FORGOTTEN JOBS

10 Professions That Vanished From The Pages of History

Image: Museums Victoria

Throughout history, the problems and necessities of society have changed again and again. And with these, the realm of work has also transformed, adapting to meet evolving demands. Some jobs simply faded away, becoming strange - or even amusing - relics of bygone eras.

Let's take a nostalgic journey through time and explore 10 jobs that no longer exist.

Image: Matt Antonioli

Once essential for lighting up the streets before electricity became widespread, lamplighters would manually ignite and extinguish gas lamps each evening and morning. With the advent of electric street lighting, the need for these nocturnal workers dwindled into darkness. However, not everything is lost! A small team of professional lamplighters are employed in London, England to turn on the gas lights that have been preserved as part of the historical heritage of the city.

Image: Museums Victoria

In the age before automated telephone systems, switchboard operators served as a vital link between callers. They manually routed calls by plugging cables into switchboards, a complex task requiring quick decision-making, good memory for names, and multitasking skills. With the rise of digital telecommunications, these operators became obsolete, but they still play a role in specific fields, such as emergency services or customer support centers.

Image: Scott Rodgerson

Before refrigeration, ice cutters braved freezing temperatures to harvest ice from lakes and rivers during winter. Their labor provided a precious commodity for preserving food and cooling drinks in the sweltering summer months. Surprisingly, well-insulated ice reserves could last all summer long. Eventually, the widespread adoption of electrical refrigeration systems rendered the services of ice cutters unnecessary.

Image: bruce mars

Before the era of alarm clocks, knocker-uppers provided a crucial service for workers and city residents. Armed with long poles or even pebbles, these early risers would tap on windows or doors at designated times to wake up their slumbering clients. This personalized wake-up service ensured punctuality for those with early morning obligations, such as factory workers or store owners. However, with the invention of affordable alarm clocks and the widespread availability of electricity, the need for knocker-uppers faded into oblivion.

Image: Joshua J. Cotten

From medieval times through the Victorian era, rat catchers were individuals employed to control vermin populations in cities plagued by infestations. Armed with traps, ferrets, and other tools of the trade, they ventured into sewers and alleys to rid urban areas of these disease-carrying pests. However, some rat catchers were accused of secretly breeding rats and releasing them to ensure their long-term employment in a given area.

Image: Jeswin Thomas

Long before electronic calculators and digital computers, human computers performed complex mathematical calculations manually. These skilled individuals, often women, were employed in various fields such as astronomy, engineering, and finance to perform computations essential for research, design, and financial analysis. In fact, the trajectory calculations for the first satellite launched by the United States - the Explorer 1- were done by hand by a group of human computers.

Image: Valerie V

In ancient Greece, bematists were skilled land surveyors responsible for measuring distances and demarcating land boundaries using simple tools and techniques such as measuring rods, compasses, and counting their steps. These early surveyors were remarkably accurate, so much so that some modern researchers speculate that they must have used some sort of odometer.

Image: Alexander Schimmeck

Dating back to 17th century England, herb strewers played a vital role in combating unpleasant odors in the royal apartments. These individuals scattered fragrant herbs, flowers, and other aromatic substances on rooms and hallways, in an effort to deter pests and bad smells. But this wasn’t necessarily because of unhygienic living conditions. In cities like London, before the construction of a proper network of sewers, the smell of the untreated waste that flowed into the river Thames could be overwhelming, to the point where drapes were sometimes drenched in bleach to try and stop the putrid stench.

Image: Byron Burns

In late 19th century Europe, toad doctors were practitioners of a branch of folk medicine that claimed the ability to cure various ailments through the use of living toads and other natural substances. In particular, toad doctors specialized in the treatment of "King’s Evil," a frequent skin disease at the time, now called "scrofula." Usually, this treatment consisted of placing a live toad inside a bag and hanging it from the sick person’s neck.

Image: Giorgio Trovato

The Groom of the Stool served as the personal attendant to monarchs during their most private moments in the lavatory. This role involved assisting the monarch with all its toileting needs, and yes… all of them. While we can be thankful that this job has disappeared in modern times, at the time it was an extremely privileged position of intimate trust in royal courts. Whoever was Groom of the Stool was often feared and envied within the court, as these intimate helpers were often rewarded with both riches and political power.

The wonders of human language

You might be surprised by these linguistic facts

If languages and grammar are not your thing, linguistics might seem complex and boring, but nothing could be further from the truth. While some areas of linguistics require prior knowledge, many linguistic concepts and ideas relate to everyday life and can be understood by anyone. Here are some simple linguistic facts that might surprise you!

People like to list languages such as Mandarin, Japanese, or Hungarian as "the most difficult languages in the world", but this is not true. Think about the ease with which babies pick up a language, becoming fluent at a similar rate, no matter the place. The difficulty of a language lies not in its structure, but in its similarities or differences with your own language. Mandarin might be extremely difficult for an English speaker, but quite manageable for someone who speaks Cantonese. So, there isn’t a "most difficult language", but a "most difficult language for you".

This might come as a shock, but you already know everything about your native language. Native speakers learn by imitation, not through methodical study, so they don’t rationalise their language; they simply speak. They might later approach the language from an academic perspective and put a name to different structures and concepts, but they will not learn anything that is actually new.

This might seem obvious, but most people don’t think about it. While differences in grammar and structures are evident, it is common for language learners to approach vocabulary as a set of labels: If I’m learning Spanish, I take an apple and label it "manzana". But languages are not labels, but a way of seeing the world, such as cultures near the North Pole having dozens of words for snow or languages in hierarchical societies changing according to the people speaking. While at a basic level we can often find one-to-one translations, the more we learn about a new language, the more we adopt a new worldview.

Does your family have certain words or phrases that mean something unique to you? It might be a funny mispronunciation that stuck, or a phrase that you use in a specific circumstance, sometimes passed down for a few generations. This is called a "familect", and it happens in most families, but also in tight-knit friend groups. The repetition and preservation of this private code reinforces familial bonds and identity, functions as an emotional anchor, and provides a sense of belonging.

Each language carries a worldview, so it is not surprising that our personality changes slightly when we change languages. We don’t become someone different, but we adapt to the cultural norms and values attached to that language. People who speak more than one language also tend to link specific interests, knowledge, and memories to each language, and specialists have noted that not only do our tone and volume change with each new language, but that we are most likely to swear or discuss sensitive or taboo subjects in a second or third language, as they provide an emotional distance impossible to avoid in our native tongue.

English is a fairly flexible language, meaning that many of its components can be placed in a different order without the sentence becoming unnatural or impossible to understand. But this flexibility does not apply to adjectives, at least when we have to use many of them in a row. English speakers naturally place adjectives in a specific sequence: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose. While this is done subconsciously, changing this order results in unnatural-sounding phrases, such as "a red new nice car".

Have you ever wondered why people refer to sign language as ASL or "American Sign Language"? Not only are there multiple sign languages, classified in families in the same way spoken languages are, but each one is a language of its own, with unique grammar, rules, and vocabulary. This way, American Sign Language (belonging to the French Sign Language family alongside its Russian, Brazilian, or Italian counterparts) is not a signed version of American English, but a distinct, unique language with more than half a million native speakers.

Languages change and shift with use and time, which causes some words to gain positive meanings, but also others to become negative. This downgrading of a word’s meaning is called "pejoration" and is connected to many factors, one of them being whether the term is considered masculine or feminine. English is not a gendered language, but it has gender-specific pairs, such as "master/mistress", "fox/vixen", "bachelor/spinster", or "governor/governess". While initially mistress, vixen, spinster, and governess were merely counterparts to the male-specific term, over time they developed a negative connotation, while the masculine term remained positive or neutral.

Babies typically start using meaningful words around the 12-month mark, so it is natural to think that, before that, babies "don’t speak". While they don’t use meaningful spoken language, they communicate from birth with cries, sounds, and gestures, and these communications have an accent. How is this possible? Third-trimester babies in utero have fully functional hearing and recognize sound patterns, pitch, and intonation. Once they are born, their cries, and later their babbles, mimic the intonation, pitch, and rhythmic patterns of the language of their environment.

What sound does a sheep make? Well, a sheep from where? English-speaking sheep go "baa", but Korean-speaking sheep go "me-e". While sheep don’t care about linguistic differences, humans adapt animal sounds to the available sounds and phonetic rules of their language. This happens not only with animals, but with all kinds of sounds, such as machines, strikes and collisions, physical and natural phenomena, human sounds, and more.