Jobs of Bygone Eras

get in here and witness the magic. I remember, I can remember. Now they draw lots and just go all right. I guess I'll go hit record and leave. I'd like to think it's because they're all overworked. That's why it's not like, you know, we're past a No, it could be both, though. I guess how you doing. I'm doing good man. I'm excited about this one. It's nice to have something that doesn't, you know, have that much weight to it. Yeah, I needed a little lighter break. Uh

and big thanks by the way to Denver, Colorado. Just came back from Denver for two sold out shows. Two great shows. Yeah, and it was. It was a lot of fun. I had fun as well. It was a good show. I think that second one, for my money, is the one we should release, as are the version of that show. Which live shows have we released? I know Chicago was Pinto's pr PRR toes was Atlantic because that was the benefit show? And what about dB Cooper dB Cooper with Seattle I believe, and then Grave Robbing

was somewhere in the UK, I would imagine. I think I think it was London, all right. So we have not released a Denver show. No, we definitely haven't. We have not, so this could be the one. If you ask me, it was just on and popping well money, You know me, I don't like to overthink these things, so I'm generally just prone to say it's good enough for you, it's good enough for me. That's very nice of you. Let's me get away with a lot. That's right. Um,

all right, well chuck, um hmm. I'm prepared now, are you? Yes? Well, then let us speak in talking about jobs that just aren't around anymore, the old stuff you should know. Top ten, which means we'll do what eight maybe if we feel like it certainly not ten. I'll tell you that I agree. So there's actually this article I thought started out pretty cleverly talking about some jobs that are probably going to be extinct in the near future, at least as far

as the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is concerned. I didn't even look at that part. So so there's a few coming up word processors and typists. Not not a lot of time left on that profession. Door to door sales workers, which I took issue with because I can see people wanting that personal touch of being bothered and

harassed by a salesperson. You know happened, Yeah, I think now it mostly happens like didn't you want to sign this this um petition or something like that, especially the door to door thing, not like here's a vacuum cleaner or set of Encyclopedia Britannicas. I do you know how just blown away you would be if somebody came up to your door and tried to sell you a vacuum cleaner. You'd be like, what's your angle? Are you case in my house or Encyclopedia's I mean, that's even moral fashion.

At least you still use vacuum cleaners. Yeah, for sure, that's true. The last one on this list was mail carriers, which will I don't know, man, I could see, I could see there's always going to be a need for physical correspondence, or there will be for a very long time. I don't know about that one. But the upshot of all this is is this, Chuck, there's this guy who you boat you and I know, uh named John Maynard Keynes,

and he is an economist. He was an economist liberal economist, and he will wrote back in an essay called Economic Stabilities of our Grandchildren, and it's actually like a quick easy read. But then he basically said a hundred years hence so by we will have done away with work, will have automated basically every process you can think of, and humans will be totally out of work. And he said that will be a really good thing, because we will still be generating wealth, but we just won't have

to work. So people will start writing bad poetry and painting terrible paintings, and eventually we'll get better and better, and there'll be like a big blooming of the arts and of like interpersonal relationships and things like that, and we'll just be able to hang out and chill, and

we've come close to that. But there's a lot of a lot of holes in Keynes's argument, whereas like if you if you're gonna do this, you kind of have to figure out a way to distribute the wealth evenly, or else you just end up with the people who own the machines are the ones who get wealthy, and everybody else is just out of work. But setting all of that aside, there is a silverlyinging to the idea that jobs can be extinct. And these this list of jobs to me kind of shows like, Okay, you know,

we move on without this kind of stuff. Yes, it's rough for the people who had that job, but you can get new training and learn another job, which for my money is part and parcel with getting rid of one job. You need to train somebody for another job as long as we humans can work. Yeah, And it's uh, I think with most jobs it's not like I mean, in some cases the thing just no longer exists, but if it's replaced by a better or newer technology or both,

then then that becomes the job. So I've never bought into this whole, like, you know, we need to protect these jobs that are surely antiquated just to keep these people in work. It's like, no, man, you've got to roll at the times you do. But I think that one of the rules of like government or even industry is to to provide training to keep up with those times.

Sure if if so, someone so chooses for sure. Sure. Yeah. Now, if it's all robots doing everything all the time, then we should be able to choose not to and you should have a nice universal basic income. But someone has to build and fix those robots, and well you build other robots to do that, all the materials and at some point, I just I don't think I agree with him fully that nobody will be working at some point you disagree with Can's all right, let's get to it.

Because first, the first job on this list, I don't think anybody was really sad to see go, although that's not necessarily true. There were fans well, and I know one person in particular it was probably pretty sad. Oh well, we'll get to him, okay. Chariot racing, Yeah, that's an extinct job. You cannot anywhere in the world find a professional chariot racer as far as we know. Yeah, but this was one that was a very very big sport back in the day and was literally like NASCAR was today,

very much so. Yeah, I mean they had, uh, if you if you look at let's say they called this the tracks circuses, if you look at Circus Maximus in ancient Rome, this thing, I mean, these things started out where people could just like sit on the hillside and watch races, but it evolved into Circus Maximus, which held a hundred and fifty thousand spectators. I saw two hundred and fifty really. Yeah, well, let's just say it's somewhere between that then, right between those two numbers. Either way,

it's super impressive, agreed. Yeah, And of course, if you don't know what a chariot races, it's very simple. It's just a race where a horse pulls a man in a in a little two wheeled vehicle called a chariot. Yeah. Everyone's seen a chariot, and the depictions I've always seen from cartoons to movies actually apparently were very um accurate. It's like closed off in the front and then kind of tapered down the sides and open in the back. There was one axle with two wheels and it was

connected to a team of horses. Usually about four horses, maybe two maybe six um and it went really really fast and it was really really flimsy. So if you collided with another chariot, there was a pretty good chance your chariot was going to disintegrate and you were going to be in trouble. Yeah, I mean just sort of like modern race cars. The chariots they designed for military battle, we're not like this. They were very sturdy, often had

a lot of metal and reinforcements. But if you were out there racing, you know, you wanted to win, so your chariot was super light, probably just made of wood. You were probably standing on that axle. It's not like they you know, you were sitting on some big throne in the center of your chariot. And uh, it was sort of like horse racing. They would you would draw lots for position, they would drop the white cloth, uh, and then up to twelve racers at a time, you know,

the gates would open and you were off. Yeah, and there were the height of the Roman Empire. There were four and then later on six teams. It was a red team, a white team, a blue team, and a green team originally, then they added purple and gold and like you said, this is like NASCAR. Are people devoted to these teams like they're devoted to racers today, or

like to football or soccer today? Um? Just fanatics. There was a story that Pliny wrote of a guy who is a fan of the Red team and when one of the Red team racers died, the fan threw himself onto his funeral pyre killed himself out of grief. Wow, which you know that happens weekly in NASCAR, you know, Uh, except they throw themselves on their their turkey friar. I don't know why I think that. I think that's probably pretty accurate, man. I bet there's a lot of turkey

friars or maybe their barbecue pit, how about that? Sure? So the dude I mentioned that was probably pretty sad to see it go, although he did finish his career, it's not like the sport went away. His name was Gaius Diocles. I haven't heard of this cat. He was someone who was likely one of the most rich people in ancient Rome that was not a member of you know,

royalty or whatever. He raced from the eighteen to the age of forty two, close to races, and I was trying to find out some sort of some kind of ballpark conversion of their money compared to our money today, and most everyone with a brain on the internet and internet said no, don't even bother, although some people were like, it's really just like a one to one ratio, So I don't buy that. But supposedly he amassed a wealth of thirty six million whatever you however, you pronounced that

sesster cs. I haven't seen that word before. Ever, that was their money. I don't know s E S T E r c E s. Yeah, I've never seen that. So I mean, let's say it is a dollar then about thirty six million bucks, which made him one of the richest people. Yeah, it is. It is impossible that the ratio or the conversion is a dollar to like one to one, I would think, so right, Yeah, that's totally impossible. Yeah, that was just some dummy on answer this dot com or something. Yeah, I'm tired of thinking

about this. Just say it's wonder why. I think it was from the webs website take a stab at it dot com. But that guy raised from eight to two huh eighteen years old, and apparently he not only was super rich, but he kept a lot of records of his races. So he's one of the only people we can look back on and say, you know, he raced this. I mean he only one about a third of his races to it looked like so. But even still just surviving that many races as boggling, like this is really dangerous.

You know, like if you're if your chariot basically exploded, you had lashed the reins to your horses around your waist to stabilize yourself better, and you were still connected to your horses by your waist and now they were dry. I give you possibly to death. So most most most racers carried a knife on them to cut themselves loose in case they weren't always quick enough with it. Yeah, and then you had to get your knife out while you're being drug at however many miles an hour or

whatever they used to distinguish speed. Plus there's always like a bad guy villain like in the ban Her race, who was trying to like chop up your chariot and whip you. Yeah. I didn't see rules as far as that went, is like were they clean races or was it you could you know, stick a a staff through somebody's wheel and flip them over. I did not see. I thought there was a range of activities. Yeah, that'd be my guess. You want to take a break. We already I mean that chariot race took up a lot

more time than I thought. This is gonna be like a three hour episode. Uh, yeah, let's take a break and we'll do what four more? Yes, didn't take another break? Sounds good. Alright, we're back Chuck with another old job that's not around anymore. This one's armorer, Yes, which is hard to say. It really strains the back necks, the

back neck muscles. Yeah, I mean, there is a modern job called an armorer, but we're talking about the dudes in the Middle Ages who would build your body armor, which was I mean extraordinarily skilled craft like you couldn't go to school to learn how to be an armorer.

You basically had to be born the son of an armorer because the skill was passed along from father to son, and secrets of how to make these these suits of armor were kept very closely secret by um by the people who knew what they were doing, because they had a lot of competition, and so as a result, historians and I guess armor specialists of today still have questions about how some of these guys made some of these amazing suits of armor because they didn't leave any evidence

of exactly how they did it. Yeah. I mean the process would start as just like a we are the people that make suits, uh Taylor Taylor, like a tailor might today. So you would lumber up, you would uh, you would strip down to your linen's and they would take your measurements and then make a replica of your body, uh if they so had the time out of wood

or something. Because it would take a long time, Like you couldn't if you wanted a quality suit of armor, you couldn't go in there and say turn it around in a week, like sometimes it would take months and even more than a year. Yeah, I saw years in some cases. Yeah, because if you want the good stuff, you gotta go. And these people made a lot of money. They they were like a subset of the smithies, like you said, like it was not something that everyone was

good at. So they would spend a lot of time with wealthy people. They made a lot of money themselves, and so they had kind of a much higher standing as opposed to like a regular smithy might yeah, and and the suits of armor that we see today, um, the ones you think of usually like a British night or something like that wearing it, those were made of like high quality steel. But steal back then this is like fairly fairly early after we really figured out how

to make steal reliably. And um, it was a real bear to work with because you would have to you'd hammer it and then you'd have to heat it up again and hammer it some more, and it would cool as you were hammering it and you have to heat it up again. So it was really tough to work with, but it was pretty strong. Um. The thing is, because steel was rare, it was also very expensive to work with.

And so the suits of armor we see today, like in museums and things, usually come from the sixteenth century. And even though they were making suits of armor similar to that and as far back as like the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, you don't see those because they reused that old steel from the old suits of armor into the new ones. And then they finally ended in the

sixteenth century when they stopped making suits of armor. But that's why you only see almost exclusively sixteenth century suits of armor that makes sense. Also saw that, um they tried to set up shop near the materials, so instead of having the transport stuff long distances and and it sounds like it was in pretty high demand if like you know, let's say someone died in battle and then they would say they wouldn't just leave that stuff out there.

Somebody would go and gather up all this stuff. UM. So I think just living near the product or the base materials was a big advantage if you were an armorer. Yeah, and armors kept up their trade. I mean eventually the the so muskets came along well. At first it made armor even better. It like pushed the development of armor

plating along even further. But then it outpaced musket development, outpaced armor development, and then there was no reason to have um armor any longer because you could just shoot right through it. But but up to that point, the armor plating got better, but then people stopped wearing as much of it, until you basically had a chess plate in a backplate and you would see people battling still.

I think even uh Napoleon's troops wore chest and backplate armor and in the American Civil War and that's it, they were naked right, like, it's so cool, but the well, no one more thing. In the American Civil War, there were people who sold chess plates. Yeah, and I think that was about as as late as it went, late nineteenth early twentieth century, you could still find an army

here they're wearing a breastplate. Maybe. Yeah. I imagine that even later on with the advent of muskets, uh, something that could stop an arrow or or a sword, like, you would probably still feel pretty good about wearing that. It wasn't too heavy. One thing I saw that I thought was pretty ridiculous was that one of the reasons soldiers didn't didn't wear a more widespread in the Civil War in America was one it was tough to to lug around. They got heavy, so when you're on the march,

I don't really want to carry that. But then secondly, like they would be chided as cowards by their by their fellow soldiers, which is like, are you a coward just for taking an extra step of protection and extra measure of protection when you're out there on the battlefield. I'm wondering if I'm missing something. I don't know. I mean, maybe back then it was just getting that time where they were like old Sally backplate over there, right, he

didn't want to take an arrow to the back. Or if you were richie rich, because you could afford a breastplate and everybody else couldn't. So they just kind of peer pressured you into dying along with them. Maybe maybe peer pressure you into dying pressure. It's pretty bad. You don't want to succumb to that peer pressure. So in this case, the armorer, and we didn't say in the last one, the chariot racers went away with the fall of the Roman Empire. This job armor went away basically

when when muskets became capable of piercing steel. Yeah, and after that, like I said, it may help with the odd arrow or knife thrust, but maybe a throwing star, the famous throwing stars of the Civil War. Uh, shall we move on? Yeah, man, moving along, We're gonna stick around. In the Middle Ages, it just kind of head on

over to the court jester. Yeah. I think this is one where there's a lot of misconceptions because while in the Middle Ages there were court jesters who would dance around with the colored cloths and the and the little hat with the bells on it and stuff like that that did occur, but from what I gathered, the general

court jester didn't really wear that that often. No. And I think one of the other misconceptions too, is that they were kind of lunkheads or dummies or just simpletons who knows, however you want to put it, when actually they were extraordinarily stu usually among the highest educated people in in any given country, certainly in a court. Um. And that they were less fools and more satirists. Yeah, alright, so let's let's break this down. There were a few

different types. The type you're talking about is the the legit court jester who would generally perform at the behest of the court. Uh. And those are the ones that were sometimes some of the only people who could speak ill of the king or queen as a satirist. Uh. You know, but you still would run a risk, you know, if you took it too far. Imagine there was more than one court jester who found their their head on

a stake at some point, for sure. Actually, I think the last one known to have lived, um Dicky Pierce, who was the fool to the Earl of Earl of Suffolk, fell to his death from a pulpit and they think they The official line is that he slipped, but um, somebody thinks that he may have actually been pushed by somebody who didn't like his little shove his stick. Yeah. So uh, it says in this one article, I found that three types of fool emerged, and that one was

the official court jester. Uh. A lot of times they would just wear normal clothes rather than that little outfit that we all know is the court ester. But then there were definitely noble families and wealthy people who would adopt men and women who had mental illness or some sort of physical deformity, and they were a little more They called them innocent fools, and they weren't paid. They were just kept around, almost like amusing pets, like wild

Peter from the Feral episode the Fear of Feareral Children episode. Yeah, and they would get like food and clothes and lodging and stuff like that, which I think was saying quite a bit, yeah, because that was that value, you know. Uh. And then they said the third class was were people of the members of the fool societies that were big

in France. And I think these were more of like what we would consider now like a rin fair performing yea, and they would definitely wear those outfits and really played up. So um the the type of fool that that belonged to a court that um they actually had like a really important position in the kingdom because like you said, they were satirists, um, and they could satirize at their

own peril. But they were also capable I think of surviving by bringing it right up to the line, by knowing just how how far you could press the king or the queen um or the court. But in doing this you could you could you you provided a service to your fellow countrymen, and that you could keep the king from getting bored and maybe going off to war um uh inadvisable, or coming up with some terrible new laws.

Or if there were some terrible new laws, the gesture was in a position to make fun of them satirically and maybe make the king rethink these policies, to help out your fellow your fellow people. So it was a very important position because you were basically the only person in the entire court who had the ability to speak freely. And again it was at your own peril to an extent, but for the most part it was accepted that you could poke fun at the king and the court and

policy and the state of affairs. Imagine it was a bit of a nerve wracking job. You would also do other things. Sometimes you would have other jobs like keeper of the hounds. Sometimes they would buy the livestock for the family. Uh. And then during times of war they would actually function, um almost as like a us O might. Like they would be brought to the front lines to entertain,

uh well to to to do two things. They would entertain their own troops to kind of try and ease them before battle, or they would mock the other side uh and try and like try and actually thwart their plan because they would get so mad at the jester they would not be thinking clearly and like make some kind of mistake because the haunting. Yeah, because the jester

farted in their general direction. Well, it's funny you mentioned that, because I did see a lot of times they would be rewarded with land at the end of their tenure. And King Henry the Second gave his jest your thirty acres upon retirement as long as he came back every Christmas to leap, whistle and fart. That's it. He's like you get one leap, one whistle, and one far and if your fart sounds like a whistle, then he just

knocked out two birds of once. Nice. So this with this job, I'm not entirely sure why it went away. I think we need gestures more than ever. Um. But the last one, like I said, was Dickie Pierce, who was full to the Earl of Suffolk, and he died in seventy of misadventure. Really well, yeah, he felt that maybe shoved. Yeah, possible homicide. I guess the closest thing we have now are either political cartoonists or the White House correspondence dinner or the Onion or the onion. Who. Man,

they've just been killing it since day one. Still, after all this time and an evolution, the onion is still just doing great stuff. Agreed. Um, Moving on. Yeah, So we're gonna advanced forward a little bit. Lulu new to the Victorian England to the late nineteenth century. And I had never heard of this job before. You no, but we have talked a lot in the past about the sheer build up of horse manure before cars weren't invented. I can't remember the stat in New York City but

it's astounding. I found one in London that there were a thousand tons of horsepoop generated a day in London streets, a thousand tons, and like this stuff would just be right there in the middle of the street. There was also trash, there was also human waste. There was just all sorts of stuff, terrible stuff everywhere. And part of the problem was that the Victorian era was really big on pomp and overdoing fashion. Um. There were long trains, addresses,

lots of skirts over skirts and all this stuff. So the idea of walking through horsepoop was not not very pleasing to the upper echelons of English society at the time. No, they would mean one of their many employees would have to clean that up later, exactly right. But apparently they were very big with um appearances, so they didn't want to even go a second without with getting like any horsepooper or any trash or anything on them. So thus

evolved a job from this, uh this era called crossing sweepers. Yeah, and this I saw a lot of different reactions to this from various historical websites that I went into. Some people saw this as a pretty valuable job, um, and then most people I saw found it a bit of an annoyance in that it was if you had any skill or were physically able, you would not be a crossing sweeper. It was what they called a last chance job. I saw, I saw both, I saw a combination of those.

Read an article by a woman named Jerry Walton, who I think did pretty good um his historical research on it, and she seemed to come up with the idea that you're right on both counts. There were some people who had who dedicated themselves to this. They were regular crossing sweepers, and they had like posts like there, They had a corner that was their corner, and over time they became kind of a fixture of the neighborhood, maybe the eyes

and ears in the neighborhood. I read of one um crossing sweeper who actually helped apprehend a murderer by by going to the cops and telling him what telling them what he saw. UM. But I also saw that there were that this was basically the the last stop before Baker, but but much more respectable than just being an outright beggar. At least you were providing a service. You could also very easily become a nuisance though too if you held your hand out afterward, or pestred people who are just

trying to cross the street. Yeah, I mean they like in it in this article maybe a little insensitively to people who will clean your windshield at a stoplight today. Uh. But again even with that have seen a range of window cleaning services that range from like nice work, here's a good tip, to like, let me spit on your wind shield and rub it with my sleeve. And I

think it was kind of probably similar back then. Sometimes there were little kids who would do it, or super old people, or you might be disabled and that is your last chance to make money. Uh. And people like you said I had had one of two attitudes. Either you're doing it right and this is a good service, or this is sort of a glorified begging. Yeah. And I saw that for the most part it was kids.

The proclaimed king of the crossing sweeps was eleven years old and eleven year old boy, and that they would also add some acrobatics in on the side to really to really drive home just how great what they were doing was. Well, it's like what like little flips and like probably probably what we would call parkour here there today something like that. But you know this little nimble like kids who were able to just hop around, do some some quick acrobatics and then probably hold their cap

out and say thanks, have a good day, what time? Yeah? So um. One thing though, that was good about this is that it was something that anybody could start as a business and take seriously with just the investment of a broom. That's all you needed. Low barrier to entry is what they call that, exactly right. And then eventually it's like sanitation improved and fashions change. The crossing sweeper was less and less necessary, and they evolved into the

grocery store bagger. You were playing them that one. It just rolled off on my tongue. Yeah, alright, good And as I was saying, I was like, man, this is gonna offend the baggers, and I don't mean it like that. That's right, all right, especially public baggers who bagged delicious cake all the time. Thank you for what you do. Should we break now or do the last for or do one and then three? Let's do one and then three. I'm I'm I'm feeling good about things all right. Well

we'll move on to the lamplighters. No way, I changed my mind. Okay, well we're gonna take a break. Okay, we'll get too lamp lighters right after this. Okay, okay, Chuck, thanks for rolling with me on that one. So you said lamplighters were doing next. I mean, I guess we're doing all this chronologically, right, Well, that sort of is in a way, yeah, because we started with cheritots and now we're up we're still in the late nineteenth century. Yeah,

and this is, man, this is something. I had a gas lamp growing up at my house, and I really, really I would like to get a gas lamp put in on the front porch of my house. You know that can happen. Yeah, I mean you just gotta run gas to it, right, Yeah, that's it, and then come and pay a lamp lighter to come lighted every every evening and cut it off every every morning. Yeah. I just love to look like there's a few in our neighborhood, and every time I see one, I pine for it.

I think you should treat yourself to a gas lamp. Yeah. It really says a lot, you know, it does. It says I have conquered fossil fuels in my very own house. I wonder how wasteful that is compared to electricity. I don't know, I really don't know. Yeah, I think you should find out and just do it. I think you should do it and report back on Okay, I can always buy carbon offsets, right, totally, alright, So lamp lighters, like we said, in the days in the nineteenth century

of gas lamps lighting up all of of let's say London. Again, someone had to light these and there were a lot of them. So it's not like I mean this was there were a lot of people doing this job. Yeah, usually you would have something like under a hundred, but over fifty lamps I saw, um, at least for Lowell, Massachusetts. But um, I think Lowe was a midsize city at the time, said seventy thousand people in the like I think eighteen eighty census, So that's decent size for the

nineteenth century, you know. Um, but it's certainly nothing like what London had at the time. They had tens of thousands of lamps, right, right, But I imagine that that they probably didn't overtax their lamp lighters more than say low did, so say, say somewhere around seventy to eighty lamps um is what one lamp lighter would be responsible for. They'd have a beat. Yeah, I mean that's a I don't know how far apart their position, but that's a

that's a full day's work. I would imagine her full evening. Well, yeah, it could. It lasted for a while, and I didn't get the impression of what you do in between, but you would wait around until dusk came, and then you would start your your route and start lighting the lamps.

And then after any respectable person was asleep, you would go out and extinguish them, or before daybreaker, around daybreak you go extinguish them, and then you would eat your breakfast, and then you set about repairing the lamps, refilling them as need be, and like getting it rid of any soot and smudge, and maybe if the lamp got knocked over, you'd have to set it back up again. So it sounded like it was, you know, there's a decent amount of work to it, but supposed it was a very

safe job from whatever. And yeah, I mean they do mention ladders in here, but I also saw that many of them were uh lit from below with a long lighter or and extinguisher that was all kind of in on one pole. Very ingenious. Yes, I don't know that they were climbing ladders all over town. No, you could just raise it up. It would be easier to walk with just that long staff than to walk with the lad her. So yeah, because you could also stab somebody in the eye with it, right any master comes at you,

bam Bamuh. Mainly men held these job, but there were some women apparently in London that did so. And like you said, it was pretty safe. It's not like these things weren't running on gasoline, you know, like whale blubber. I don't think is the most combustible thing in the world. No, um. And then I think there were there was also natural guests.

They eventually laid gas lines to these things too, so all you had to do is walk around with a like a whale probably whale blubber torch on the end of your staff and just touch touch the lamp wick and there you go. And then I think they made something like two dollars a day for this, at least in Lowell, mass It's not bad King's ransom. I did see that there are still some people that do this today.

There are certain parts of England where they still light the lamps, and I'm sure it's a bit of a novelty. But um, I don't know that it's necessarily like like Colonial Williamsburg or anything. I think it's not like it has to be an old relic themed town, just one that's involved in being charming. Yea, yeah, lamplighter and if you see a lamplighter, give him a little how do you do? Yeah? Off your cap? Yeah, So it's not extinct. It really doesn't belong on this list at all, though.

A couple of pints their ways, their ways Tuppins. Remember that song from Mary Poppins so depressing. No, but I have high hopes for that reboot. Oh, I hadn't heard anything about that. Please do tell well there's a new movie coming out they're redoing, uh, Mary Poppins, and and Emily Blunt is Mary Poppins, which I think it's fine casting. And I think what's his name? Lynn? Manuel Miranda himself

is in the ABU say the Dick Cabitt part. But that wasn't Dick van van Dyke, the chimney sweep Dick Abbott. That would have been a much different role. Yeah, tell me, Mary, tell me about your life. Shall we move on to ice cutting? Yeah? This one I love. It's fascinating. You know my grandmother Bryant said, ice box. Yeah, yeah, I would imagine that that was like part of her jam, right, like an actual like something you would point to and say,

that's a refrigerator. But no, no, no, friend, there's no refrigeration going on whatsoever. It's just an insulated wooden box that you jam a block of ice into the top of and let it cool the rest of it down. Yeah. I mean if she she loved to be a hundred and she passed away probably I don't know, like eight or ten years ago, so she was definitely rocking the ice box when she was a kid for sure, and into her probably like um married life, I would guess,

the early married life. Yeah, I mean, she told me a story one time about when she was like twelve or thirteen, she and her two friends stole the uh, the horse and carriage that delivered the mail and rode it around town for a joy ride. That sounds awesome, so that she was definitely a link to the past. It was great hearing those stories. The male horse hats off to you. Granny Bryant. Yeah, hats off Granny Bryant. So she had an ice box. I just described an

ice box. But the question is this, chuck, Let's say, where was Granny Bryant born and raised? I didn't know where she was born, but she generally lived in most of her life in Tennessee. Okay, in Tennessee. So it's the middle of the summer and it's super hot, but you have an ice box. What are you gonna do for ice? Well, Fortunately, the good folks up in Illinois

and Wisconsin and Minnesota spent the winter harvesting ice. And that was a job you could have, was an ice harvester, because before there was the advent of making mechanical ice and mechanical refrigeration, we got ice by literally harvesting it from frozen ponds and lakes and rivers during the winter, packing it away just so, and then come summertime it would be distributed throughout the country and delivered two homes by again horse and carriage like the mail. Apparently amazing.

So here's how it would work. You would uh, sometimes they could use a pond, but generally very slow moving water was best because it formed really good clear ice. I saw something about ponds weren't great because the ice could become kind of stagnant and not not super great. Gross. Yeah, so maybe a very slow moving uh river would be great. And the first thing that you want to do is is probably use a horse drawn plow because you don't

want that thing packed up with snow on top of it. No, because the snow actually keeps the ice from freezing as as well, because you want cold wind on it, not cold snow. Right, right, So you got the horse keeping the the snow clear. That's one, one step one and that's what they would call these ice farms. And like you would have an ice farm, like if somebody came and tried to poach your ice, you had a legal

dispute going on, like this is a big deal. And during the summer it was just like a river or a an aer raided pond or something like that. But come come wintertime it became like big business. You'd have whole crewise and operations going on. Right, So you've got this the horses clearing the snow, and every once in

a while a horse would fall through the ice. It is sad and you would think, well, so long horse, But Apparently somebody figured out that you could strap a rope around a horse's neck and it would be struggling under the water, and if you pulled the neck tight, I guess you kind of cut off its air enough to get it to quit struggling. It does and then other horses would pull that horse out of the water

and giving it a fighting chance to survive. So that was a big hazard, not just for horses, but for the people working there too, and they would wear special horse shoes that would prevent them from slipping and breaking through as much as possible. But yeah, I would imagine a horse drawn plow on ice is just an accident

waiting to happen. I remember growing up in Toledo, we were allowed to ice skate on some of the ponds on the golf course, like across the street from US and UM, but not until Dad went out with his work boots on stomped around the pond to make sure that it didn't crack. And it was like, that was really great that he was doing that for uce, but it was also not the best technique you could think of, although it's the only technique I can think of, really,

But hats off to Dad. Too, for stomping on the pond ice for us to make sure we didn't fall through. Your dad would do that, Oh yeah, every every winter, some sometimes a couple of times in winter, depending on whether the ice had started all or not. Yeah, I've seen too many movies that just scares me. Yeah, yeah, I guess. Uh, well I didn't. You don't really think much about your mortality as a youngster, you know, no

kind of invincible. Uh So, all right, so they're clearing the snow, but it gets super frozen when there's no snow, like really frozen, and then you would come in and score the ice because just cutting it is is too tough by that point, so you score it by cutting into it I guess a few inches and getting it going depending on your operation, dependent on the kind of size of an ice block you want. But they said in our article maybe two ft by six ft was

pretty standard. And then you would cut it all the way through with another horse drawn device, a horse drawn saw, I think, almost all the way through, and then humans would saw it the rest of the way, and then you've got like a floating two ft by six ft by However thick the ice was chunk of ice, right,

and that's heavy. That's a very heavy thing. So you would kind of push it with sticks through a channel that you had to carve out to the shoreline, and um, then you had to figure out a way to raise it out of the water onto like a cart or something like that, and then take it to the ice house, which was a probably a cement like cinder block building that um you would pack with sawdust so that this ice wouldn't melt onto one another or melt at all

during the summer, and then just wait for summer to come and then bam, start charge of people money, yep I. And this was a job through like the nineteen thirties until you know, refrigeration became a thing, and then people like my grandmother, they couldn't You couldn't stop saying ice box or tinfoil, Yeah, tin foil. I hadn't thought about that. I mean, I'd still say tinfoils. Seat and olio she said olio instead of butter. That's that's growdy. How could

you eat that if you call it olio? You know, I don't know she never I don't know why she said that because she didn't use butter. She used the big bell jar bacon grease that she collected sitting on the stove, like even on bread. No, no, no no, just for cooking. I got you. But she was old school man. It's kind of neat when you have a link to

the past like that. One more thing about ice cutting. Um, one of the best three stooges ever was called an Ache and every Steak, and they were ice delivery men. I think I remember that. Yeah. They had a lot of trouble with it, as as you can expect. There were probably some tongs placed in the wrong area at one point where Mo yeah and Curly Yeah. I think they both got it. Probably Curly did it first accidentally to Mo, and then Mo retaliated on purpose, I remember correctly.

All Right, two more to go. Yeah, we really are doing eight this time? Huh. I think so so, Chuck. When you go to a bowling alley, right um, and you roll the ball, I'm gonna go ahead and give you the benefit of the out. You would hit a strike, Thank you, Steve ruck In the how you say, I don't think so. Um, When you knock all his pins down an awesome machine comes down, well, there wouldn't be

any pins left. But if there was one standing, a machine would come down, grab it, raise it, and then a sweeper would come and push all of the knockdown pins that you hit, which are called deadwood by the way, back into a little pit, and then a new set would come down and reset and your ball would shoot out. And the whole thing is a marvel of mechanical engineering.

It's all mechanical. But there was a time where if you went bowling, there were little boys back there who did all the jobs that I just said that machine did. They were known as pin setters. That's right, and we have Mr Gottfried Freddie Schmidt to thank for the automatic pin spotter, where he debuted this thing at the American Bowling con Grits Tournament. But like you said, previous to that, they had little pin boys who would for about what

ten cents per game, per bowl or per games. So if you had like six bowlers bowling in a in a game, you would you'd make sixty cents a game. Technically. Oh really, Hi, Yeah, you could make some dough if you really hustled. Wow. That's not bad for a ten year old at the time, not at all. But here's the thing too, I mean, I guess it's the great way to the best way to pay them for a bowling alley. But because you don't want to pay them while there's no one bowling. No, no, it's like per

bowl or per per game. So yeah, if you're just standing around, you're not making any money. Yeah, So they would they would set the pins up. They would uh, they would wipe the pins away by means of carrying them. And they actually had pinbars that they would step on to raise these little metal spikes and that's how they would align the pins. They just didn't eyeball it right. And I read an account by a former or pin

pin setter. Um, and so you're hanging out there where people are throwing the bowling ball where it hits the back, like you're hanging out back there. So there's a couple of things going on. Um. Apparently teenagers would love to take aim, sometimes drunken adults, so you had to watch out for people bowling at you. Pins sometimes would get knocked to the back and hit you in the shin

or the head or something like that. But this account that I read was, Um, this guy, this kid was saying like there was no better way to like secretly enter the world of adults than to be a pin setter, because adults would go bowl and get drunk and you were in the back basically invisible, but you're hearing everything. You're seeing everything. You could hear something from way down there. Yeah,

from way back there. From what this guy said, at the very least you can watch their their physical behavior or whatever. But um, yeah, he said he learned quite a bit about human nature by being a pin setter. Yeah. I guess the the equivalent of trying to throw your ball at the pin setter is when you go to a golf driving range. Slightly dude comes out in the in the sixty Volkswagen Beetle with a ball trough on the front of it, and everybody on that driving range

tries to hit that car. In Unison, it's just I think one of the things you do. I haven't been to a driving range and forever, but when that car comes out, there's one objective, see if you can hit it, and then that guy driving or the girl driving to screams at the top of their lug stop stop. I'm a human being. Well, and for the for people who don't understand these these old cars are heavily caged, so it's not like you're gonna hit anybody or breakthrough a

window or anything like that. Sure you're not. But they also electrify the cage so that the person can't get out. It's pretty fun. I've always wanted to drive one of those. I've never seen a beetle. I've always seen like some sort of like a lawn tractor or something like that with a pokemobile top on it. Oh see back, I don't know. I've been by golfing a long time, but all the courses I went to you had just old gelopes. Yeah, it sounds like the people running the courses you went

to were smoking grass, growing grass and smoking grass. Right, Uh so what else about these people? Basically overnight they vanished. The first moment those automatic pin setters came about. That was that was that? But the that kid whose account I read or the man whose account I read as a kid, No, that still doesn't work, you know what

I'm saying. Yeah, I'm not gonna say it a third way. Um. He said that it took him about two months to realize that you set set the pins and then you roll the ball back to give yourself time to get out of the way. If you roll the ball back and set the pins. By that time the person's got their ball ready and they take aim for you. Jerks. Jerks, indeed, bowler's notorious jerks. Hmm some of them, sure, Like John Leguizamo, No, John Toturo, Oh, Jeseus. Yeah, like Tsus you did huh well,

except for the fact that he was a petterist. He was a bit of a jerk too. Yeah, he was a better and I forgot about that part. Uh. Yeah, okay, so pin setters, Uh, the last one. This is my favorite of all time. Yeah. Party line operator. Not to be confused with the party line operators from the party lines of the eighties and nineties. These are the much more innocent party lines of the early twentieth century. Yeah. So, here's how telephoning used to work back in the old days.

If you lived out in the sticks, uh, and imagine even in certain city blocks, but if you lived out in the rural areas, you would have a shared telephone line between sometimes ten or twenty houses. Uh, and you would have your own special ring that you would be able to recognize. And when someone calls all twenty houses, the phone rings and you have to know your ring to answer, or you're gonna pick up and be listening to your neighbor's conversation, which which happened a lot. Yeah,

apparently that was called rubbering. You have no idea why, but it's what you were doing, your eaves dropping on your neighbor. And it's called a party line. Yeah, and so the party line. Um, they they had party lines because this is at a time when running telephone line and operating and maintaining it was very, very expensive because it was early in the telephones infancy. Right, So you rural Nebraskan should just thank your lucky stars that you even have a telephone. Don't don't try to get all

fancy and ask for just your own line. That would come later. But um, when you had this party line, you you could ring your own neighbor on the same party line if you knew their ring. Like when you look at the old telephones where you have the receiver that you hold up to your ear and you speak into the mouthpiece, you see people crank it. Sometimes what they're doing is they're actually turning a magnet inside a

spool of copper coil um. So that and there's they're turning it in a way that it's mimicking the ring of the family on their party line they're trying to reach. So if the family's ring is a long, short long, they're like ring, ring, ring, that's how they're they're spinning. The magnet creates a current which translates into the ring on all of the other phones in the party line. So you could call people yourself, but if you wanted to call outside of your party line, you had to

dial the operator, yes, which was a long ring. Uh. And you would call central what they called Central, which is where the switch board was, and they were you know, someone was there twenty four hours a day, lived there. Yeah, and like in their little apartment that they would they would have set up for them. And uh, if you if you needed an emergency, it was generally agreed upon

that the longest ring possible was an emergency. So if you're on a party line of like let's say fifteen houses and there's a tornado coming through, you're the first one to see it. You would do a long, long, long, long ring, and everybody on that party line would either just know that's a warning or they would know to pick up all, everyone could pick up the phone at once and Elmer could say we got a tornado come in,

and then it was like the origins of pretty much. Yeah. Yeah, it was a good way to communicate quickly with your neighbors. It was. It was a lifesaver. Yeah, another reason you should just be happy to have any kind of phone line, you hay seed. So this rubbering thing was was like you said, it was quite a as you can imagine, since there have been neighbors, there have been neighbors trying to get another neighbor's business, So, uh, it was. It

was a big deal. Like sometimes they even said in here you could kind of fashion a speaker phone if you just wanted to listen in but not stay in there by just letting the earpiece drop into like a bucket or something ooops, and it would just you know, to amplify the sound and you could go about cleaning your house and listening in on your neighbor's conversation. Yeah.

And something Granny Bryant knew but took to her grave and never share with anybody is that if you hung it, dangled it into a croc a bacon fat, it would really amplify it. That's I'm sure she had a party line. There's no way she lived in Tennessee. Starting in the nineteen d and part yeah for sure. And this actually, I mean party lines went on for a while, as you know, in the city, um where you know, people demanded respect from phone companies. You you got your own

line sooner than later. But out in the rural areas they continued on quite a while. And there's actually a movie called Pillow Talk starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Pretty great, cute little romcom from the late fifties, but it was from nineteen fifty nine and the whole basis of the plot revolved around a party line. Oh yeah, like a mix up and it tensional mix of he toyed with her a little bit. Yeah, yeah, that's a

good one. I like it. Well that's it man. Oh yeah, party line operators they went the way of the dinosaur when everybody started getting their own line and you didn't need the party line operator. Nope, So long, get out of get out of this office that you live in. And now we've evolved to the point where everyone has their own WiFi that's locked down by password and nobody

couldn't use it. Yeah, think about it. Do you remember the times when you would call a number and you you you could get any one of a number of family members at the same number. And now it's like you call somebody and you're calling that person. Everyone has a phone number. It's like the next evolution from a party from party lines to individual household lines. And now

individual people have lines. Because you would call and say, can I speak to Josh, and then Mom would say, Josh phone, and then after a couple of minutes, you'd hear Mom hang up, stop rubbering, and then Mom would fake it because she needed to know about all your AH cigarette activities. Yeah, that's right. She'd be like, I didn't know he switched to men thal. That's it, all right, I got nothing else? All right? Extinct jobs? Will yours

be next? We'll find out in ten years. If you want to know more about extinct jobs, there's a there's an article we didn't cover two of them on the site at how stuff works dot com. And since I said that, it's time for a listener, mayo, I'm gonna call this uh Christiania m follow up. We heard from quite a few people that have been to this little idyllic or is it a dyllic village in uh near Copenhagen in Denmark? Yeah, Denmark, which is where Copenhagen is, right. Hey,

I's been an Abod listener for about five years. I do not live in Christiania. Is that it's pronounced Christie? I think Christianna. All right, you may have misspelled it, but I did visit about five years ago. My cousin lives in Copenhagen. I live in Ireland, and he took me on a trip there after dark, in the middle of winter. It is a beautiful place, filled with arts, crafts in striking architecture. When we first entered, my cousin was quick to point out the sign that said have fun,

don't run no photos. Asked him why, and he said, due to the nature of the site, like the sale of cannabis and other soft drugs that are otherwise illegal. Uh. And in fact, I'm adding this part myself, they're illegal there as well. Um. Because apparently other people said the cops will rate it sometimes uh. And in fact she says occasionally it is rated by police and running is seen as a threat of danger and as his photography for the same reasons. So apparently you don't run there, brother, No,

you just chill. Yeah, just take its low man. At just nineteen, I was pretty intimidated. But why what I saw is lawlessness? Until my cousin mentioned we go for dinner there. He took me up a stairway covered in graffiti and artwork, only two open heavy doors into what remained my favorite restaurant of all time. Yeah, this sounds pretty amazing. Low wooden beam ceilings, white table cloths, and a simple, gorgeous, entirely in Danish menu that my cousin

kindly translated. What followed was the most beautiful and memorable meal I've ever had, and it changed my idea that this place was lawless and scary. Since then, I've urged any friends to visit Denmark to stop by. Next time I visit my cousin, I'll be sure to go during the day and taking the beautiful murals in the sun between you guys and the mcelroys. Hope to never run out of informative and entertaining podcasts. You never will. Lots of love your Irish Pal. Thanks a lot, Irish Pal.

That was a great story man. The idea of going to the best restaurant you've ever been to in an anarchist project in Denmark is pretty awesome. Yeah, and other people's you I should point out just that went during the day talked about how just insane some of these houses were because at one point, I think there was a a contest or something and all of these houses or a lot of these houses were built during that time frame, and you know, they just range from these

crazy art looking homes to just very modest things. But it just sounds like some people did send a few pictures like decorating your cubicle around a holiday or something, which no either do you know. So if you want to get in touch with me and Chuck, you can follow us on social you can go to stuff you Should Know dot com and all of our links are there. You're gonna love it, And you can also send us

an email, right, Chuck, that's right. Send it to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.