20 Jobs That Vanished Once New Technology Took Over

From the 1500s into the 1800s, British kitchens needed meat rotated constantly over an open fire, or it burned. Breeders solved this by creating the turnspit dog, a short-legged breed built to run inside a wall-mounted wheel geared to the roasting spit. The turnspit dog was essentially a working dog rather than a pet. They were eventually replaced when rotisserie devices began running on springs, and later on steam and electricity. The breed went extinct, although one stuffed turnspit dog, called Whiskey, is on display at the Abergavenny Museum.

Between the 17th century and the American Civil War, firing naval cannons required loose gunpowder charges to be carried up from below-deck magazines. This was the responsibility of boys, called “powder monkeys,” between the ages of about 10 and 14, who hauled tubs of gunpowder up a narrow ladder to the gun deck during battle. The adult gun crew loaded and fired the cannon; the boys only carried the charge. With steam warships and mechanical hoists for ammunition, the days of powder monkeys were over by the late 19th century.

From 1800 to 1860, European and North American doctors prescribed the bloodletting of patients suffering from fever or inflammation. They used millions of leeches each year. To catch them, leech collectors, mostly poor women, would wade barefoot into muddy bogs and allow the creatures to latch onto their flesh, then pick the engorged specimens off their skin and put them in a basket. There was risk involved for the leech collectors, both in terms of blood loss and infection. Germ theory replaced bloodletting as the basis of medicine by the late 1800s, bringing the mass trade to an end. Today, leeches are still used in some surgical procedures.

During the Industrial Revolution, and well into the 1950s, factory workers in the northern English and Irish mill towns would lose a portion of their wages if they arrived late. But most households couldn’t afford an alarm clock. So instead, they would pay a knocker-up a few pennies per week to walk the streets before dawn, knocking on windows with a long bamboo pole, a soft mallet, or even dried peas until the person inside got up. The arrival of cheap alarm clocks rendered the profession obsolete.

British and North American medical schools were eager to learn about the human body by dissecting fresh corpses, but in an era without embalming, only recently buried corpses could be used. While the law permitted only the bodies of executed criminals to be used for dissection, medical schools hired resurrectionists to exhume newly buried bodies from cemeteries instead. They worked under cover of darkness with wooden shovels and sackcloth to avoid detection. Britain’s 1832 Anatomy Act provided medical schools with legal access to unclaimed bodies, and chemical preservation later became commonplace, removing the need for fresh corpses. Together, these effectively ended the resurrectionist trade.

The French inventor Louis Daguerre revealed the daguerreotype in 1839, the first commercially successful photograph. Producing one required a skilled technician from beginning to end. The daguerreotypist polished a sheet of copper sheathed with silver until it shone like a mirror, then sensitized it in iodine vapors. After exposing it in a camera, the plate was developed by heating it over toxic mercury fumes. The resulting plate was a unique metal object. More economical glass negative processes eclipsed it by the 1860s.

From the late 19th century through the early 1960s, the term “computer” described humans, particularly the women of the West Area Computing unit at NACA, NASA’s predecessor agency. Because observatories, the military, and the burgeoning aerospace industry needed complex calculations for trajectories and navigation done quickly, human computers worked in groups to break down complicated mathematical problems into smaller, assembly-line-type tasks. These tasks were performed and then passed to other human computers, using tools such as slide rules, mechanical adding machines, and paper ledgers. The rise of electronic mainframe computers, notably IBM’s, began to replace human computers in the 1950s and ’60s.

Between the 1810s and 1930s, gas streetlights were not centralized or automated to turn them on and off, so every single streetlight in the city needed to be lit by hand. The lamplighter would take a route during twilight, carrying a long pole tipped with an open flame and a valve key, opening the gas valve in each lamp and wiping away the accumulated soot from the glass. At sunrise, he would come back to extinguish the flames. Between the 1910s and the 1930s, electric streetlights and automatic timers ended the profession.

Until 1955 or so, bowling alleys had no automatic resetting. A pinboy knelt at the bottom of every lane to retrieve pins, roll balls back up the return, and reload the pins, risking getting struck by stray pins or early throws. A pinspotter was built in 1946, but it wasn’t until a commercial model in the early 1950s that pinboys were actually pushed out of the trade.

In the quiet of cigar factories in Cuba and in Tampa’s Ybor City, torcedores, or cigar rollers, pooled a portion of their wages to pay for lectors. The lectors would sit on a raised platform and read out loud to the workers from newspapers and novels as they worked. The workers would tap their cutting knives on the tables when they heard something they approved of. Unhappy with the potential political influence of the lectors, factory owners banned them in Tampa in 1931 during a period of labor strikes.

When radio dramas were performed live during the Golden Age of Radio (1920s-40s), there was no magnetic recording tape yet, so sound effects could not be recorded beforehand. The studio sound technician had to stand next to the actors and do things like smash a miniature door for a door-slamming sound effect, crank a box of gravel for footstep sounds, or rub two coconut shells together for the sound of galloping horses. They had to time each effect exactly right for the live script. Magnetic tape editing allowed sound to be recorded in advance.

Between the Middle Ages and the early 1900s, houses didn’t have flush toilets or sewer lines, so human waste accumulated in backyard privy vaults. Nightmen were employed to dig out those vaults manually. They worked strictly between 12 a.m. and sunrise to spare residents the smell. They used a long-handled scoop to put the waste into horse-drawn tank wagons that were tightly sealed against odors, then transported the waste to rural farmland where it was used as fertilizer. This profession disappeared from the 1880s to the 1930s, as modern cities installed underground sewage systems and indoor plumbing.

From the 1840s to the 1950s, the electric telegraph was capable of sending messages rapidly via copper wire, though it couldn’t carry actual speech or text. Trained telegraphers listened to the clicks of an acoustic sounder in order to decipher the Morse code, translating it into text and typing it up quickly. They would then reply by tapping on a spring key. Railroad companies, newspapers, and the military relied on telegraph operators. Long-distance telephone calls and teletypewriters rendered manual decoding obsolete.

From the late 1870s until the middle of the 20th century, every time you made a phone call, you needed a physical connection between two wires. When the user picked up the handset, a light would flash at a central exchange, and an operator, a “Hello Girl,” would ask for the desired number. Usually young women, they were recruited for their manual dexterity. They would plug in a cord with the correct number. Automatic switching and rotary phones eventually took over the job.

From the 1300s to the middle of the 20th century, town square clocks were enormous towers driven by heavy stone or iron counterweights that were kept suspended by gravity. Towns employed a clock winder, who climbed up a narrow spiral staircase every few days to crank the counterweight back up, oil the mechanism, and adjust the clock’s pendulum for the time of year. The clock-winding labor was performed by electric motors and self-winding devices from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Elevator operators worked from the late 1880s to the 1950s, controlling the hand lever (or rheostat switch) inside the cab of early city skyscraper elevators. It took considerable skill for the elevator operator to feather that lever so the floor would sit flush with the landing and not cause a trip hazard as people walked on and off. He or she also manually opened the heavy lattice doors. Push-button controls and automatic sensors eventually made the job obsolete beginning in the 1950s.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, canals such as the Erie Canal carried barges loaded with coal, grain, and timber. These barges had no engine, since the weight of a steam boiler would have prevented one from fitting. Instead, a mule or horse pulled the barge by a rope along the towpath near the bank. A young driver called a hoggee walked or rode next to the animal for 15-hour shifts past locks and beneath bridges. This type of transportation was brought to an end by steam tugs and the railroads.

In the period between the 1830s and the 1920s, when artificial refrigeration wasn’t available yet, the only way people kept their food cold was by cutting natural ice from frozen lakes. Farmhands used a horse-drawn ice plow, which Nathaniel Wyeth had invented in 1827, to cut perfect rectangular grids of pure ice and then sawed out uniform blocks. They’d pack the ice in sawdust in icehouses, then ship it around the world in insulated railroad cars. It took until the 1940s for artificial ice plants and electric home refrigerators to destroy the industry.

On Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine, a skilled union technician would type on an unfamiliar 90-key keyboard in the order ETAOIN SHRDLU, rather than QWERTY. This caused the Linotype machine to select individual molds for each letter in the brass plate-making process, then cast a solid metal line of type in molten lead heated to approximately 535 degrees Fahrenheit. The job combined typing on deadline with tending hot metal pots. Eventually, phototypesetting and computer publishing replaced all of this.

From the early 1800s until the 1950s, there were no roads in logging camps throughout North America and Scandinavia, so timber was floated down the rivers in spring. The log drivers wore spiked boots and held iron-tipped poles, known as peaveys, and walked out on top of logs that were not roped together in freezing rapids to steer the timber and break up jams before they turned dangerous. This technique became obsolete between the 1920s and 1950s with the advent of diesel trucks and logging railways.

This content was created with the help of AI.