Stuff You Should Know - Jobs of Bygone Eras

Episode Date: July 17, 2018

Join Josh and Chuck today as they take a fun look at some of the strange jobs that our ancestors did. It's a SYSK top 10, meaning there will only be eight or so.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Casper the ghost, our new producer.

Say hi, Casper. Hi. Yeah, Jerry's on vacation. Guest producer Tristan came in and tapped the record button with his nose as is per tradition, and then he left. And here we are again. That's the new tradition.

People just come in and be like, yeah, here you go, see. Boy, remember the old days when guest producers would claim her to 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 then leave. I like to think it's because they're all overworked. That's why, and it's not like we're passe.

No. 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 have that much weight to it. Yeah, I needed a little lighter break.

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 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 the version of that show.

Which live shows have we released? I know Chicago was Pintos. PR. PR, right. Pintos was Atlanta because that was the benefit show. And what about D.B. Cooper? D.B. Cooper was Seattle, I believe. And then Grave Robbing was somewhere in the UK,

I would imagine. 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, you know me, I don't like to overthink these things.

So I'm generally just prone to say, if it's good enough for you, it's good enough for me. That's very nice of you. Sure. Let's me get away with a lot. That's right. All right, well, Chuck, I'm prepared now, are you? Yes.

Well, then let us begin talking about jobs that just aren't around anymore. Then old stuff you should know, top 10, which means we'll do what, eight? Maybe, if we feel like it. Certainly not 10, 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 there's a few coming up. Word processors and typists, 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? I didn't even know that still happened. Yeah, I think now it mostly happens, like don't you want to sign this petition or something like that?

That's usually the door-to-door thing. Not like, here's a vacuum cleaner or a set of encyclopedia Britannicas. 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 casing my house?

Or encyclopedias, 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 I don't know, man, 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 this, Chuck. There is this guy who you and I know named John Maynard Keynes. And he is an economist. He was an economist, a liberal economist. And he wrote back in 1930 an essay called Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren. And it's actually like a quick, easy read. But in it, he basically said 100 years hence, so by 2030,

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 holes in Keynes' argument, whereas like if you're gonna do this,

you kind of have to figure out a way to distribute the wealthy evenly, or else you just end up with the people who own the machines or the ones who get wealthy and everybody else is just out of work. But setting all of that aside, there is a silver lining through the idea that jobs can be extinct.

And 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, 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 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.

Sure. Just to keep these people in work. It's like, no man, you gotta roll with the times. You do, but I think that one of the roles of like, government or even industry is to provide training to keep up with those times. Sure, 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. Call the materials in the oven 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 Keynes? All right, let's get to it. Because 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 was probably pretty sad.

Who? 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, if you look at, let's say, they called the track 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 150,000 spectators. I saw 250,000. Oh, 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 race is,

it's very simple. It's just a race where a horse pulls a man 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 accurate. It was like closed off in the front and then kind of tapered down the sides

and opened 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. 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 gonna disintegrate and you were gonna be in trouble. Yeah, I mean, just sort of like modern race cars, the chariots they designed for military battle were not like this, they were very sturdy, often had a lot of metal and reinforcements, but if you were out there racing, 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 you were sitting on some big throne in the center of your chariot. And it was sort of like horse racing. You would draw lots for position, they would drop the white cloth, and then up to 12 racers at a time, the gates would open and you were off.

Yeah, and the height of the Roman Empire, there were four and then later on six teams. There 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. There are people devoted to these teams, like they're devoted to racers today,

or like to football or soccer today, just fanatics. There is a story that Pliny wrote of a guy who was 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.

Oh, sure. You know. Except they throw themselves on their turkey fryer. I don't know why I picked that. I think that's probably pretty accurate, man. I'll bet there's a lot of turkey fires in NASCAR. Or maybe they're barbecue pit. How about that?

Sure. One of two. 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. Wow. That was not a member of royalty or whatever. He raced from the 18 to the age of 42, close to 4,300 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 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 36 million, whatever you, however you pronounce that, cesterces. 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 than about 36 million bucks, which made him one of the richest people. Yeah, 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.com or something. Yeah, I'm tired of thinking about this. Just say it's a one-to-one. I think it was from the website, takeastabadit.com. But that guy raced from 18 to 42, huh? 18 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 won about a third of his races too, it looked like so. But even still just surviving that many races is mind-boggling, like this was really dangerous. You know, like 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 dragging you possibly to death. So 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 was always like a bad guy villain, like in the Ben Hur 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 staff through somebody's wheel

and flip them over? I did not see. I bet there was a range of activities. Yeah. That'd be my guess. Will you want to take a break? Should we already? I mean, that chariot race took up a lot more time

than I thought. That's gonna be like a three hour episode. Yeah, let's take a break and we'll do what, four more? Yes. Then take another break? Sounds good. All right. We'll see you in the next episode.

We'll see you in the next episode. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and we'll see you in the next episode. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by

step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, 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 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 suits of armor were kept very closely secret by the people who knew what they were doing because they had a lot of competition. 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, what are the people that make suits? A tailor. Like a tailor might today. So you would lumber up, you would strip down to your linens, and they would take your measurements and then make a replica of your body if they so had the time out of wood or something. Because it would take a long time.

If you wanted a quality suit of armor, you couldn't go in there and say turn it around in a week. 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 got to go. These people made a lot of money. They were like a subset of the Smithies, like you said. 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 Smithie might. Yeah, and the suits of armor that we see today, the ones you think of usually like a British knight or something like that wearing it, those were made of like high quality steel. But steel back then, this was like fairly early after we really

figured out how to make steel reliably. And it was a real bear to work with because 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'd have to heat it up again. So it was really tough to work with, but it was pretty strong. 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 16th century. And even though they were making suits of armor similar to that as far back as like the 14th and 15th 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 16th century when they stopped making suits of armor.

But that's why you only see almost exclusively 16th century suits of armor. That makes sense. I also saw that they tried to set up shop near the materials. So instead of having to transport stuff long distances, and it sounds like it was in pretty high demand if like, 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. So I think just living near the product or the base materials was a big advantage if you were an armorer. Yeah, and armorers kept up their trade. I mean, eventually the muskets came along. Sure, goodbye armor. Well, at first it made armor even better. It pushed the development of armor plating along even

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

I think even Napoleon's troops wore chest and back plate armor. And in the American Civil War, you know. And that's it, they were naked despite that. Right, they're like, it's so cold. Well, one more thing, in the American Civil War, there were people who sold chest plates. Oh, yeah?

Yeah. And I think that was about as late as it went. Late 19th, early 20th century, you could still find an army here. They're wearing a breast plate, maybe. Yeah, I imagine that even later on with the advent of muskets, something that could stop an arrow or a knife or a sword, like you would probably still feel pretty good about wearing

that, as long as it wasn't too heavy. One thing I saw that I thought was pretty ridiculous was that one of the reasons soldiers didn't wear a more widespread in the Civil War in America was, one, it was tough to lug around. They got heavy. So when you're on the march, you don't really want to carry that.

But then secondly, they would be chided as cowards by their fellow soldiers, which is like, are you a coward? Just for taking an extra step of protection, an 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, oh, Sally backplate over there. He didn't want to take an arrow to the back. Or if you were richy 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 pressured you into dying? Yeah. So really the worst peer pressure of all. 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, armorer, went away basically when muskets became capable of piercing steel. Yeah, and after that, like I said, it may help with the odd arrow or knife thrust. Yeah. Maybe a throwing star. The famous throwing stars of the Civil War.

Shall we move on? Yeah, man, moving along. We're going to stick around in the Middle Ages and 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 gestures who would dance around with the colored cloths 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 often. No, and I think one of the other misconceptions, too, is that they were kind of long heads or dummies or just simple tins. Who knows how ever you want to put it?

When actually they were extraordinarily astute, usually among the highest educated people in any given country, certainly in a court, and that they were less fools and more satirists. Yeah, all right, so let's break this down. There were a few different types. The type you're talking about is the legit court jester who would generally perform at the behest of the court.

Right. 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. But you still would run a risk. If you took it too far, imagine there was more than one court jester who found their head on a stake at some point.

For sure, actually, I think the last one known to have lived, Dickie Pierce, who was the fool to the Earl of Suffolk, fell to his death from a pulpit. And they think the official line is that he slipped. But somebody thinks that he may have actually been pushed by somebody who didn't like his schtick. So it says in this one article I found

that three types of fool emerged. And that one was the official court jester. A lot of times they would just wear normal clothes rather than that little outfit that we all know is the court jester. 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 Feral Children episode. Yeah, and they would get food and clothes and lodging and stuff like that. Which I think was saying quite a bit at this time.

Yeah, because that was that value. Right. And then they said the third class was where people of the members of the Fool Societies that were big in France. And I think these were more of what we would consider now like a rent fair performer. Yeah, exactly.

And they would definitely wear those outfits and really play it up. Right. So the type of fool that belonged to a court, they actually had like a really important position in the kingdom. Because like you said, they were satirists. 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 far you could press the king or the queen or the court. But in doing this, you provided a service to your fellow countrymen in that you could keep the king from getting bored and maybe going off to war inadvisably or coming up with some terrible new laws.

Or if there were some terrible new laws, the jester was in a position to make fun of them satirically and maybe make the king rethink these policies to help out 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. I imagine it was a bit of a nerve-wracking job. Sure. 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.

And then during times of war, they would actually function almost as like a USO might. They would be brought to the front lines to entertain, well, to do two things. They would entertain their own troops to try and ease them before battle or they would mock the other side and try and actually thwart their plan

because they would get so mad at the jester, that they would not be thinking clearly and make some kind of mistake because of the taunting. 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 II gave his jester 30 acres upon retirement

as long as he came back every Christmas to leap, whistle, and fart. That's it. You get one leap, one whistle, and one fart. And if your fart sounds like a whistle, then... He just knocked out two birds with one stone. Yep. Nice.

So this job, I'm not entirely sure why it went away. I think we need jesters more than ever. But the last one, like I said, was Dickie Pierce, who was full to the Earl of Suffolk and he died in 1728 of misadventure. Oh, really? Well, yeah, he fell from that pole pit. Maybe shoved, yeah, possible homicide.

Yeah, I guess the closest thing we have now are either political cartoonists or the White House Correspondents Dinner. Or the Onion. Or the Onion. Who, man, they've just been killing it since day one. Yeah. Still, after all this time and evolution,

the Onion is still just doing great stuff. Agreed. Moving on. Yeah. So we're gonna advance forward a little bit to the Victorian England to the late 19th century. Yeah. And I had never heard of this job before, did you?

No, but we have talked a lot in the past about the sheer buildup of horse manure before cars were invented. I can't remember the stat in New York City, but it's astounding. I found one in London that there were 1,000 tons of horse poop generated a day in London streets. 1,000 tons.

1,000 tons. And 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. There were long trains to dresses, lots of skirts over skirts and all this stuff. So the idea of walking through horse poop was not very pleasing to the upper echelons of English society at the time. No, they would, I mean, one of their many employees would have to clean that up later.

Exactly, right. But apparently they were very big with appearances, so they didn't want to even go a second with getting any horse poop or any trash or anything on them. So thus evolved a job from this era called crossing sweepers. Yeah, and this, I saw a lot of different reactions to this from various historical websites that I went to.

Some people saw this as a pretty valuable job. 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. Sure, I saw a combination of those. I read an article by a woman named Jerry Walton, who I think did pretty good 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 dedicated themselves to this. They were regular crossing sweepers. And they had like posts, like 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

of the neighborhood. I read of one crossing sweeper who actually helped apprehend a murderer by going to the cops and telling them what he saw. Oh, sure. But I also saw that there were, that this was basically the last stop before Beggar. 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 pestered people who were just trying to cross the street. Yeah, I mean, they liken it in this article, maybe a little insensitively to people who will clean your windshield at a stoplight today. Uh-huh.

But again, even with that, that I 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 windshield 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.

And people, like you said, 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 11 years old and 11 year old boy and that they would also add some acrobatics in on the side to really drive home just how great what they were doing was.

What? Like what? Like little flips and like probably what we would call a parkour here today, something like that. But you know, just little nimble like kids who were able to just hop around and do some quick acrobatics and then probably hold their cap out and say thanks, have a good day.

Wow, what a time. Yeah, so 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. Right, low barrier to entry is what they call that. Exactly, right.

And then eventually is like sanitation improved and fashions changed, the crossing sweeper was less and less necessary and they evolved into the grocery store bagger. You were playing on that one way in advance, huh? I just rolled off of my tongue. Did it? Yeah. All right, good job.

And as I was saying, I was like, man, this is gonna offend the baggers and I don't mean it like that. No, that's all right. All right, that's a valuable job. Especially public baggers who bag delicious cake all the time, thank you for what you do. Should we break now or do the last four

or do one and then three? Let's do one and then three. I'm feeling good about things. All right, well, we'll move on to the lamp lighters. No way, I changed my mind. Okay. We're gonna take a break, okay? We'll get the lamp lighters right after this.

Okay. All right, well, we're gonna take a break, okay? Packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, Chuck, thanks for rolling with me on that one. Sure.

So you said lamp lighters were doing next. I mean, I guess we're doing all this chronologically, right? Well, it sort of is, in a way. Yeah, because we started out with chariots, and now we're up, we're still in the late 19th century. Yeah, and this is, man, this is something. I had a gas lamp growing up at my house. I had a gas lamp growing up at my house.

I had a gas lamp growing up at my house. I had a gas lamp growing up at my house. I had a gas lamp growing up at my house. And I really, really 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 in, pay a lamp lighter to come light it every evening and cut it off every morning. Yeah, I just love the 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. 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. I think you should find out and just do it.

I think you should do it and report back on it, okay? That can always buy carbon offsets, right? Totally. All right, so lamp lighters, like we said, in the days in the 19th century of gas lamps lighting up all 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 100 but over 50 lamps I saw, at least for Lowell, Massachusetts. But I think Lowell was a mid-sized city at the time. It said 70,000 people in the, I think, 1880 census. So that's decent size for the 19th century, you know? 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 they probably didn't overtax their lamp lighters more than, say, Lowell did. So say somewhere around 70 to 80 lamps 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 they're positioned, but that's a full day's work, I would imagine, or full evening.

Well, yeah, it could, it lasted for a while. And I didn't get the impression of what you'd do in between, but you would wait around until dusk came, and then you would start your route and start lighting the lamps. And then after any respectable person was asleep, you would go out and extinguish them. Or before daybreak or around daybreak,

you'd go extinguish them. And then you would eat your breakfast, and then you'd set about repairing the lamps, refilling them as need be, and like getting it rid of any soot and smudge. And maybe if a 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 supposedly it was a very safe job from whatever end. Yeah, I mean, they do mention ladders in here, but I also saw that many of them were lit from below with a long lighter, or an extinguisher that was all kind of in one pole. Very ingenious. Yes, I don't know that they were climbing ladders

all over town. No, you can just raise it up. It'd be easier to walk with just that long staff than to walk with a ladder, so. Yeah, cause you could also stab somebody in the eye with it. Right, any masher comes at you, bam, bam, pow, pow. 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, and then I think there were, there was also natural gas, they eventually laid gas lines to these things too, so all you had to do was walk around with them,

like a whale, probably a whale blubber torch on the end of your staff and just touch the lamp wick, and there you go. Yeah. And then I think they made something like $2 a day for this, at least in low mass. It's not bad, in 1888? No, it was 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 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. It's just one that's involved in being charming.

Yeah. Yeah, lamp lighter. And if you see a lamp lighter, give them a little how do you do? Yeah. Toff 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? Tuppence. 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 Mary Poppins and Emily Blunt

is Mary Poppins, which I think it's fine casting. For sure. And I think of what's his name, Lin-Manuel Miranda himself is in the, let's say the Dick Cavett part, but that wasn't Dick Cavett. Dick Van Dyke. Dick Van Dyke. The chimney sweep.

Yeah, Dick Cavett, that would have been a much different role. 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 lived to be a hundred and she passed away probably, I don't know,

like eight or 10 years ago. So she was definitely rocking the ice box when she was a kid. For sure, and into her probably like married life, I would guess, the early married life. Yeah, I mean, she told me a story one time about when she was like 12 or 13, she and her two friends stole the horse and carriage that delivered the mail

and rode it around town for a joy ride. That sounds awesome. So she was definitely a link to the past. For sure. It was great hearing those stories. The mail 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 don't know where she was born, but she generally lived the 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, hacking it away just so, and then come summertime, it would be distributed throughout the country and delivered to homes by, again, horse and carriage, like the mail apparently. Amazing. So here's how it would work.

You would, 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 super great. This is gross. Yeah, so maybe a very slow moving river would be great.

And the first thing that you wanna do 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 well because you want cold wind on it, not cold snow, right? Right.

So you got the horse keeping the snow clear. That's one, one step one. Yeah, and this 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 an aerated pond or something like that. But come wintertime, it became like big business. You'd have whole crews and operations going on, right? Oh yeah. So you've got this, the horse is clearing the snow and every once in a while, a horse would fall through the ice. Yeah, that's so sad.

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.

Sounds awful. 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. Yeah, 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 in the golf course, like across the street from us. And, 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 us, 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.

So your dad would do that? Oh yeah, every winter. Sometimes a couple of times a winter, depending on whether the ice had started to thaw or not. Yeah, I've seen too many movies that just scares me. Yeah. Yeah, I guess you don't really think much about your mortality as a youngster, you know?

No, good point. You're kind of invincible. 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 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 feet by six feet 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 foot by six foot 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 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 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 charging people money. Yep, and this was a job through like the 1930s

until refrigeration became a thing. And then people like my grandmother, they couldn't stop saying icebox or tinfoil. Yeah, tinfoil, I hadn't thought about that. I mean, I still say tinfoil sometimes. Sure, yeah, totally. And Olio, she said Olio instead of butter. That's grody.

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 of bacon grease that she collected sitting on the stove. Like even on bread? No, no, no, just for cooking.

I got you. But she was old school, man. Yeah, that is old school. It's kind of neat when you have a link to the past like that. One more thing about ice cutting. One of the best three stooges ever was called an ache in every steak.

And they were ice delivery men. I think I remember that. Yeah, they had a lot of trouble with it, as you can expect. There were probably some tongs placed in the wrong area at one point. Poor Moe. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Yeah, and Curly, yeah, I think they both got it. Probably Curly did it first accidentally to Moe and then Moe retaliated on purpose, if 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?

And you roll the ball, I'm gonna go ahead and give you the benefit of the doubt. You would hit a strike. Well, thank you. Steeruck. Isn't that how you say it? I think so. When you knock all those 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 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're known as pin setters.

That's right, and we have Mr. Gottfried Freddy Schmidt to thank for the automatic pin spotter in 1946 where he debuted this thing at the American Bowling Congress Tournament. But like you said, previous to that, they had little pin boys who would, for about what, 10 cents per game? Per bowler per game.

So if you had like six bowlers bowling in a game, you would make 60 cents a game, technically. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, you could make some dough if you really hustled. Wow, that's not bad. For a 10-year-old at the time, not at all. But here's the thing too. I mean, I guess it's the great way to,

or the best way to pay them for a bowling alley, but because you don't wanna pay them while there's no one bowling. No, no, it's like per bowler per game. So yeah, if you're just standing around, you're not making any money. Yeah, so they would set the pins up. They would wipe the pins away by means of carrying them.

And they actually had pin bars 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 pin setter. 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. Apparently teenagers would love to take aim, sometimes drunk in 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, this kid was saying like there was no better way to like secretly enter the world of adults than to be a pin setter. Cause 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, what this guy said, at the very least you could watch them, their physical behavior or whatever. But yeah, he said he learned quite a bit about human nature by being a pin setter. Yeah, I guess the equivalent of trying to throw your ball at the pin setter is when you go to a golf driving range and that dude comes out in the 65 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 in 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

just screams at the top of their lungs, stop, stop, I'm a human being. Well, and for people who don't understand, these old cars are heavily caged. So it's not like you're gonna hit anybody or break through 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 some sort of lawn tractor or something like that with a pulpmobile top on it. Oh, see, back at, I don't know, I've been playing golf in a long time, but all the courses I went to had just old jalapes.

Yeah, it sounds like the people running the courses you went to were smoking grass. Growing grass and smoking grass. That's right. So what else about these people? Pinspots? Well, basically overnight, they vanished. The first moment those automatic pin setters came about,

that was that. But that kid who's a count I read or the man who's a count I read as a kid, no, that still doesn't work. You know what I'm saying. I'm not gonna say it a third way. He said that it took him about two months to realize that you 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. Man, jerks. Jerks, indeed. Bowlers, notorious jerks. Some of them, sure, like John Leguizamo.

No, John Terturo. Oh, Jesus? Yeah. I liked Jesus. You did, huh? Well, except for the fact that he was a pederist. He was a bit of a jerk, too. Yeah, he was a pederist.

I forgot about that part. Yeah, okay. So pin setters, done. 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 80s and 90s.

These are the much more innocent party lines of the early 20th century. Yeah, so here's how telephoning used to work back in the old days. If you lived out in the sticks, 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 10 or 20 houses, and you would have your own special ring that you would be able to recognize. And when someone calls all 20 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 also happened a lot. Yeah, apparently it was called rubbering. I have no idea why, but that's what you were doing. You were eavesdropping on your neighbor. Yeah, and it's called a party line. Yeah, and so the party line, they had party lines because this is at a time

when running telephone line and operating it and maintaining it was very, very expensive, because it was early in the telephone's infancy, right? Sure. So you rural Nebraskan, should just thank your lucky stars that you even have a telephone. Don't try to get all fancy

and ask for just your own line. That would come later. Yes. But when you had this party line, 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 so that, and 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 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 and you would call central,

what they called central, which is where the switchboard was. And they were, you know, someone was there 24 hours a day. Yeah, lived there. Yeah, and like in their little apartment that they would have set up for them. And 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 15 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. Everyone could pick up the phone at once and Elmer could say, we got a tornado coming. And then it was like the origins of 911. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, it was a good way to communicate quickly with your neighbors. It was a lifesaver.

Yeah. Another reason you should just be happy to have any kind of phone line you hayseed. So this rubbering thing 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 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. And go, oops. Yep, and it would just 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 shared with anybody is that if you hung it, dangled it into a crock of bacon fat, it would really amplify it. That's correct. I'm sure she had a party line.

There's no way. She lived in Tennessee. Oh yeah. Starting in 1900, she definitely had a party line. Yeah, for sure. And this actually, I mean, party lines went on for a while as in the city where people just demanded respect from phone companies.

You got your own line sooner than later but out in the rural areas, they continued on quite a while. And there was actually a movie called Pillow Talk starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson, pretty great cute little rom-com from the late 50s. But it was from 1959 and the whole basis of the plot revolved around a party line. Oh yeah, like a mix-up?

An intentional mix-up. He toyed with her a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was 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 this office that you live in. And now we've evolved to the point where everyone has their own Wi-Fi that's locked down by password and nobody can use it. Yeah, think about it, do you remember the times

when you would call a number and 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 are calling that person. Everyone has a phone number. It's like the next evolution from party lines to individual household lines to now individual people have lines.

Yeah, 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 cigarette activities.

Yeah, that's right. She'd be like, I didn't know he switched to menthol. That's it. All right, I got nothing else. All right, extinct jobs. Will yours be next? We'll find out in 10 years. If you want to know more about extinct jobs,

there's an article, we didn't cover two of them on the site at HowStuffWorks.com and since I said that, it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this Christiania follow-up. We heard from quite a few people that have been to this little idyllic, or is it idyllic village near Copenhagen. Yeah, in Denmark.

Yeah, Denmark, which is where Copenhagen is. That's right. Hey guys, I've been an Abbott listener for about five years. I do not live in Christiania. Is that what's pronounced? I think Christiana. All right, she may have misspelled it. Okay.

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, and 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. And in fact, I'm adding this part myself, they're illegal there as well. Cause apparently other people said the cops will rate it sometimes. And in fact, she says occasionally it is rated by police

and running is seen as a threat of danger. And as is photography for the same reasons. So apparently you don't run there, brother. No. You just chill. Yeah, just take it slow, man. At just 19, I was pretty intimidated but what I saw was lawlessness

until my cousin mentioned we go for dinner there. He took me up a stairway covered in graffiti and artwork only to open heavy doors into what remained my favorite restaurant of all time. Yeah, this sounds pretty amazing. Low wooden beam ceilings, white tablecloths 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 take in the beautiful murals in the sun.

Between you guys and the McElroy's, I 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 too 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 contest or something and all of these houses or a lot of these houses were built during that timeframe and 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 I don't do. No. Neither do you. No. So if you want to get in touch with me and Chuck,

you can follow us on social, you can go to stuffyoushouldknow.com and all of our links are there, you're going to love it. And you can also send us an email, right Chuck? That's right. Send it to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

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