20 Jobs Humans Used To Do By Hand Before Machines Took Over

By the 1920s, push-button elevators were available, but building owners retained human operators because many riders were uncomfortable traveling without someone present. The human operator manipulated mechanical levers, manually brought the car level with each floor, and manually pulled the weighty inner and outer doors apart. After World War II, labor costs and increasingly reliable safety features of automatic doors gradually replaced the need for operators, accelerated in part by an elevator operators’ strike in New York City in 1945.

If you wanted to call someone, you simply picked up the receiver and told the operator where to connect you. The operator then plugged a flexible cord into the corresponding hole on the switchboard, a service that went public in 1878 in New Haven, Conn. Initially manned by teenage boys, the system was eventually taken over by women. It’s said that undertaker Almon Strowger patented an automatic switch when he suspected one operator of diverting his business. By 1950, there were still about 342,000 operators working for Bell.

Before computers, the word “computer” was a job title. In 1935, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which eventually became NASA, employed the first all-women computing pool at its Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Armed with only pencils, logarithmic tables, and desktop mechanical calculators, this team of women, most of whom had degrees in mathematics, calculated everything from flight paths to lift coefficients. Each calculation was checked by another person in the pool.

Before automatic pinsetters, young men working as pinboys would crouch inside a shelter at the end of the lane, and after every roll, they’d duck away from flying pins, push the ball back onto the return track, clear the fallen pins, then use a manual rack to set up new pins. AMF (American Machine and Foundry) demonstrated a two-ton machine in Buffalo in 1946, but problems kept the pinsetter out of bowling alleys until 1951-1952. And pinboys continued to dodge pins.

For decades, motorists didn’t have to pump their own gas. During the 1920s, visible-glass-cylinder pumps required attendants to crank gasoline up into a glass measuring bowl from which gravity fed it down into the car. Attendants also cleaned windshields and checked oil and tire pressure. Though Frank Urich opened an early self-serve station in Los Angeles in 1947, fire codes restricted self-serve for decades; it wasn’t common until the late 1960s.

Inventor Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine, introduced in 1884, automated typesetting but still required a trained operator to punch keys on a 90-key keyboard (called “etaoin shrdlu” after the top three rows), causing brass letter molds to drop into position and form a complete line of type, which was then filled with molten lead (kept at 535 degrees F) to create a type slug. The era of cold-type printing did not arrive until the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1920s to 1950s, soda jerks were the people in the drugstore soda fountain who mixed all soft drinks and sundaes by hand. The title came from the jerking motion used to pull the carbonated-water handle, which you would pull forward for a heavy flow or push back for a fine mist. Soda in bottles, vending machines, and fast food restaurants had killed the soda jerk job by the late 1950s.

In the 1940s and 1950s, civilian observers in the Ground Observer Corps reported aircraft sightings over the phone to nearby filter centers where plotting operators wearing headsets would stand above large tabletop maps, pushing plastic markers with wooden croupier-style rakes to track altitude and heading in real time. The use of this manual plotting continued for much of the Cold War until it was replaced by the semi-automatic SAGE air defense system from 1958 to the early 1960s.

Back in the heyday of 35mm film, you needed a trained, licensed projectionist to run two carbon-arc projectors at once. Each reel contained 1,000 to 2,000 feet of film, lasting just 15 or 20 minutes of movie time. The projectionists would feed the film through the projectors, manage arcs that could reach 6,000 degrees F, and keep an eye out for those little cue marks on the screen to quickly change reels from one projector to the other every 20 minutes or so.

Prior to ATMs, you had to go to a bank teller’s window. You placed your passbook or deposit slip into a brass wicket. That was the small opening in the teller’s counter or window. The teller retrieved the appropriate paper ledger card from a tub file, counted the money by hand, verified your signature on a paper card, and then stamped your passbook. Barclays Bank installed the first automated cash dispenser in the world in Enfield, north London, in 1967, and the move toward automated banking started from there.

In Britain and Ireland, industrial and mine workers hired professional “knocker-uppers” at a cost of 2 to 6 pence per week to be roused from bed for early morning shifts. With long bamboo poles fitted with soft batons or pea-shooters, they would gently tap on upstairs bedroom windows, not the front doors, lest they wake up non-paying neighbors. The advent of cheap alarm clocks and the spread of electrification saw the trade decline in the 1940s and 50s.

Signalmen did their work from within a signal box, high above ground level, pulling away at the mechanical interlocking frame, a set of heavy iron levers connected by wire and rod to the track switches and semaphore signals outside. One lever could take over 80 pounds of pull to move. John Saxby patented the interlocking frame in 1856, but it wasn’t until after World War II that centralized traffic control automated much of the switching.

Prior to electric power lines and photocells, the lamplighter would take a long pole with a torch and hook and, in the evening, climb each lamp, open the gas valve, and set the torch ablaze. At dawn they would return and close the valve and clean the glass. Pall Mall in London was the first street to have public gas lighting, introduced in 1807. The lamplighter covered 50-80 lamps per day, with a walk of up to 10 miles before the advent of electric lighting.

There was no cash drawer behind the counter. Instead, clerks stuffed cash and receipts into round metal capsules that were launched through pneumatic tubes at speeds of 20 to 30 feet per second. The practice was first installed by John Wanamaker in his Philadelphia store in 1880. The capsules were carried to a central cash room where dispatchers would open them, make change, and send the money back out to the store floor. It continued until motorized cash registers put an end to the practice by midcentury.

Gas and electricity were delivered to working-class homes in Britain and cities in North America via wall-mounted slot meters. Households dropped in coins like shillings or quarters to keep the supply running. Meters were collected on a regular basis by meter readers who used a master key to open them, count the contents, and check the dials for tampering. They would then leave a receipt. The coin box metering systems flourished from the 1910s to the 1950s, when post-war credit billing rendered the system obsolete.

Prior to automated speaking clocks, people wishing to know the time asked a telephone operator, who would read the time directly from a master clock in the exchange, synchronized to observatory time. Paris had the first automated speaking clock in 1933, and London’s GPO (General Post Office) introduced its own “TIM” service in 1936. It wasn’t until 1948 that Pacific Telephone converted California to recorded time broadcasts.

During the 1910s and 20s, as city traffic increased, many cities constructed tall elevated towers at busy intersections where police would flip physical switches to manually turn the signal lanterns outside on and off. In 1920, Detroit police officer William Potts put in place manual, multi-color traffic signals. Two years later, in December 1922, New York erected bronze towers along Fifth Avenue. Because they were in the middle of the street and blocked traffic flow so severely, New York demolished them in 1929 in favor of automated corner signals.

For long-distance communication, you needed a good telegrapher, say, at Western Union. A sending operator would use a brass key to convert text to electrical pulses. The receiving operator would listen to an acoustic sounder to hear the pulses. By ear, they would translate the clicks back to text at 30 to 40 words per minute. Decades earlier, in 1844, it was Samuel Morse who sent the first official telegraph message, from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. Automated teleprinters didn’t fully take over until decades later.

In the days before automated in-room alarm clocks, guests calling for a wake-up call were directed to a PBX operator working the hotel’s internal telephone switchboard. The operator kept track of all calls on paper ledgers divided into 15-minute intervals, then manually plugged a cord into the correct room’s jack at the appointed minute and recited the time and weather for the guest personally.

Diners and taverns in the 1930s and 40s also carried telephonic jukebox machines like the Shyvers Multiphone or the AMI Automatic Hostess. A customer would insert coins into the machine and talk their request into the microphone provided. There were no records stored within the counter box. The signal was sent over the telephone lines to a central location, where a worker, usually a woman, would take the disc from a library of up to 170 songs and play it on the fly.

This content was created with the help of AI.