We can confidently say from enough experience that job hunting in this economy is pretty hard for most. To make matters worse, some people are getting their jobs replaced by automation or new improvements in technology by the day. The funny thing about this, though, is that job replacement is a fairly old phenomenon that has been around for centuries. Here are 10 odd jobs that you can’t get today.
Related: Ten Harsh Realities of Common Jobs in the Old West
10 Cigar Factory Lector
The role of ‘el lector’ in Ybor City’s cigar factories
If you’ve ever worked long hours at a dead-end job, you’ll know just how boring it can be. Some folks in the past might’ve had on-site entertainers to make the hours go by more pleasantly. That’s where lectors come in. You can think of them as readers, similar to lecture hall speakers in universities. But these lectors would tell factory workers stories of intrigue and news of the day, which helped give them the morale to push on through exhausting workdays.
Lectors first came about in 1865 in Havana cigar factories, as employers needed ways to keep their employees from feeling disgruntled and overworked. Sometimes, workers would get classical literature read to them, such as the works of Shakespeare or Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Sometimes, lectors would be discerned as too radical by some factory workers and would be forced out of the workplace, leading to strikes and other revolts among the workers.[1]
9 Lamplighter
King’s Coronation: The last lamplighters of London – BBC News
For most of the modern world, we have the convenience of lamplights that come on automatically when night sets in, thanks to modern technology. However, this wasn’t always the case, as most of the world had to make do with people whose job it was to manually light lamplights. The occupation goes all the way back to 1812 and was fairly common in places like Victorian-era England.
Lamplights back then were powered not by electricity but largely by a gas flame. This meant that actual people had to go from lamplight to lamplight and relight them by hand. The job was as commonplace as any other, like garbage collection or firefighting, though it had a lot less high stakes. It was a prestigious job often handed down from family member to family member. However, you’d be hard-pressed to find any around today.[2]
8 Pinsetter
Milwaukee’s Holler House keeps it old school with human pinsetters
Bowling is one of the greatest North American pastimes, and it’s fun for the whole family. The game is straightforward, loud, and competitive, making it perfect for rowdy group activities. A lot of bowling enthusiasts may not know this, but they take one aspect of the game for granted: setting up the pins. Nowadays, it’s entirely automatic, as a machine collects the pins and sets them back up again. Before the rise of technology, however, being a pinsetter was a legitimate job.
While bowling is thousands of years old, the mechanical pinsetter wasn’t invented until 1936 by a man named Gottfried Schmidt. Human pinsetters, much like their mechanical counterparts, only by picking up the fallen pins and placing them in the correct spot one by one. This was monotonous, low-paid work often done by teenagers and didn’t last very long, as you could imagine.[3]
7 Ice Cutter
The Hidden History of Ice Harvesting in New England
Nowadays, ice cubes are the easiest thing in the world to get, as anyone with a fridge can have some dispensed. This wasn’t always the case for older societies in the past, as refrigeration technology is a fairly recent thing. So ice cutters would go out to frozen bodies of water and cut large blocks deep out of the ice to sell elsewhere.
Icemen would use horse-drawn plows to clear off tracts of ice first before scoring and sawing down into the frost. These precisely cut ice blocks would then be sent down a channel through the water for easy collection by drivers. This ice was then taken back to towns for sale, where people could take and store ice in ice boxes to keep the ice from melting too fast.[4]
6 Switchboard Operator
The Life of a Telephone Operator in 1969 (with special introduction) – AT&T Archives
Smartphones are just about the most ubiquitous piece of tech in the world, but there was a time when the only way to call someone was to use a landline and dial an operator. This is where switchboard operators come in: people whose job it is to connect you with another household telephone. Switchboard Operators first came about with the invention of the telephone switchboard in 1878. As the use of telephones became vastly more common use, operators were needed to connect callers across countries.
Switchboard operators were overwhelmingly female in the 20th century. Their jobs were to connect a series of wires on the switchboard to various ports, which made long-distance calling possible. Eventually, this job phased out as telephone technology improved rapidly over the second half of the century. Still, the women who made telecommunications possible will always be remembered in history.[5]
5 Knocker-Up
Before Alarm Clocks, There Were ‘Knocker-Uppers’
You might be asking just what in the world a “knocker-up” is. Well, before people had the convenience of digital alarm clocks and smartphones to wake us up in the morning, people had to rely on human alarm clocks called knocker-ups. They were quite popular in England throughout the 19th century in poorer neighborhoods where people couldn’t afford watches to wake them up.
The job of a knocker up was exactly as it sounds: going door to door with an unusually long stick and tapping on bedroom windows one at a time. This was often enough to rouse up the inhabitants, though some people often complained about excess noise. Just be thankful you weren’t born in the Dickensian era of London.[6]
4 Soda Jerk
This soda fountain in Los Angeles is straight out of an old-time movie!
Now, just what in the world is a soda jerk? It’s a pretty funny name that has nothing to do with being mean to people. On the contrary, soda jerks were people paid to fill fountain drinks for customers at restaurants before the rise of automated machines. The phrase “soda jerk” is old-time slang referring to these types of restaurant workers, often referring to the motions they made twisting the soda machine handles.
Classic soda was made by mixing soda water and syrups from separate lever-operated machines. Soda Jerk operators not only handled soda but also drinks like milkshakes, egg creams, and floats. Soda jerks are nowhere near as common in the modern era now, but you can still see them occasionally at old-timey diners doing what they do best.[7]
3 Cigarette Girl
Gwen Joy, The Cigarette Girl
The Roaring Twenties are considered by many to be the most glamorous era of American history. It had everything, from flapper girls and smoke-filled jazz clubs to prohibition-era booze runners. One of the absolute hallmarks of the era was the cigarette girl.
To put it bluntly, the job of a cigarette girl was to look pretty and to sell tobacco products. She was a vital part of many bar and club scenes of that era, as she’d carry around trays with cigarettes, drinks, and other assortments like candy and souvenirs. Not only did she bring in revenue, but she also enticed more clientele to visit that specific club. Nowadays, the job has mostly segued into general hostess & waitress duties without the tobacco focus.[8]
2 Powder Monkey
1812 Hamilton – Powder Monkey
As you’ve probably noticed by now, many of the items on this list share something in common: pretty silly names. Despite its humorous name, a powder monkey was something quite serious. Powder boys worked on navy warships and helped ferry gunpowder from cannon to cannon in battle. As you can expect, this was quite a dangerous job, especially since most of the time, powder boys tended to be kids.
Long before modern naval warfare, battleships had to rely on sail power and inefficient weaponry that had to be loaded with gunpowder and cannonballs constantly. Powder boys often risked serious injury or even death, which is a huge reason why the job went away entirely. Modern child labor laws and general ethics helped eliminate the practice. Still, it remains a rather ghostly chapter of military history.[9]
1 Baby Farmers
Victorian Era Baby Farming Was A Breeding Ground For Monsters | Heinous History
Like powder monkeys, baby farming also has a silly name, but it is no laughing matter. Back in the Victorian Era, being a single mother was a pretty bad proposition if you were also poor. Abandoning the child was also extremely illegal and could see prison time or death for the mother in some cases. Baby farmers were essentially like proto-adoption services, people who’d take unwanted children in exchange for a small lump fee and a promise to rehome them.
A few kids did end up rehomed, but many did not. It was much easier for baby farmers to abandon or murder the child outright than to try and find a suitable home for them. They could cycle through children quickly this way, all while pocketing large sums of cash. It was a fairly evil practice that we are much better without nowadays.[10]
fact checked by
Darci Heikkinen
