1. the alarm clock.
The profession of the human alarm clock (or knocker-up) existed in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Usually it was a boy or, on the contrary, an elderly person, or even a woman, who knocked on the windows of factory workers so that they would not be late for their shift. Sometimes a special stick was used for this purpose, and sometimes the "alarm clock" simply threw small stones or shot dry peas through the windows.
Such people received little, a few pence a week. The employers were both the workers themselves (they would leave a sign on the windows or doors that they needed to be woken up) and the factory owners (and are you still complaining about your social package?). The profession disappeared in the 1920s, when mechanical alarm clocks appeared.
2.Lecturer.
A cigar factory worker whose job was to entertain workers by reading to them or giving them interesting information to diversify their monotonous labor. The profession appeared in Cuba, but gained the greatest popularity in New York. But the lecturers were quickly replaced by radio, because the factory owners did not like them reading Communist political manifestos and texts about the benefits of the trade union movement to the workers.
3.Radar
Before the advent of modern air defense, the armed forces used acoustic mirrors to detect enemy aircraft by the noise of their engines. They were used by special people to try to hear if enemy aircraft were approaching. For example, during World War I a whole network of concrete acoustic mirrors was installed on the coast of England. Some of them still survive today.
4.The Rat Catcher
Cities have always suffered from hordes of rats, which spoil food and carry various diseases. Therefore, in European capitals (London, Paris, Prague) and some major cities operated squads of rat catchers, who destroyed the animals with special loops-sniffers. This work was lucrative, but dangerous, because the rat-catcher could be bitten. And wandering through sewers and garbage dumps was not very pleasant either.
5.Pinspotter
Before the advent of automatons in bowling clubs, the task of collecting and displaying pins was performed by boys, hence the second name of the profession - pinboy. Being a pinboy was considered quite a prestigious job. For each game the boy earned 5 pence. The profession finally disappeared when Gottfried Schmidt invented a mechanical pinspotter in 1936.
6.Calculator.
Today the computer is a powerful computing machine, but originally it was a living person, most often a young girl, who was in the office doing calculations and calculations, typing. And certainly played solitaire for sure!
7. ice-picker and ice-dispenser
The forerunners of today's refrigerators - ice cabinets - required a constant replacement of ice, which was usually taken from a river or lake. An ice maker would crush the ice, and a bicycle delivery man would take it to the houses. People posted signs on their houses to let the iceman know how much ice they needed. The profession disappeared when refrigerators became widely available to the majority of the population in the 1940s.
8.Telephonist.
In the days of landline telephones, which our generation still caught up with, the profession of "switchboard operator" was commonplace. It was mostly girls who worked at the stations. They were usually addressed as such: "Girl!" Later, telephonists worked only to connect long-distance calls. Remember Vysotsky's song "Zero Seven"?
9.Daguerreotypist
In the glorious good old days (and this is what we mean now), when selfies had not yet been invented, people's portraits were transferred onto a silver-plated copper plate. The process was laborious and complicated and disappeared with the advent of photography's predecessor, the wet colloid process, in 1851.
10.The lanternmaker.
The first street lamps appeared in 1417 in London. They were operated by a team of one hundred recruits, whose duty was to light and extinguish street lamps, and to fill them with flammable liquids. In Russia, the first lanterns appeared in 1698, and there were only eight of them, located near the Tsarist Palace. In the nineteenth century, gas lanterns appeared that lit and extinguished automatically.
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