My mother used to be a switchboard operator, and she's only 62 - she was kind of offended when we were in a history museum and there was a switchboard just like she used to use, haha
I worked a switchboard (badly) in the 60s when I had a summer job as a hotel receptionist. And I'm with T's mother too - perfectly normal, everyday stuff classed as antiques? C'mon!
I'm 58 and the telephone equipment I started out as an apprentice on in 1981 Strowger is also in a Museum :-) I also have one of those first mobile phones I recovered from a skip back in 92 is now a collectors piece. I think programming the video recorder was harder than my job now as a cyber consultant.
"Big ice" was the first to buy refrigeration units. They were big complex machines only economical for large operations. Many people still had ice boxes and ice delivery for decades after that.
I forget all the details, but the railroad created the ice industry. Ships carried it too, but it was the railroads that allowed ice to get to every small town and whistle stop in the US. They built huge warehouses that were double walled, and filled with sawdust and they stacked it full of ice from the Great Lakes. Double walled train cars did the same, and they put blocks of ice in train cars of perishable items. Then they started to carry train cars of ice to sell the ice. But, then a southerner invented refrigeration. And ice plants popped up in every small town. These ice plants still loaded train cars, but they also sold ice locally, and the ice from the Great Lakes was suddenly worthless. Ice could be made all year round and they didn’t suffer such great losses during the summer. Originally they had to cut about 4 times as much ice as they sold, so it would last all Summer. It was probably the late 50’s or early 60’s before they stopped selling ice door to door, and people bought refrigerator freezers for their homes, in numbers that eliminated the need for door to door ice. I recall the local ice plant in the town I live in was operating after I was married in the early 80’s, they made the ice sold at stores or you could go buy large blocks of it at the plant. Now, I think the bags of ice we see at local stores are made by a machine, that makes those round ice pieces we now see, no large plant is needed. And refrigerated train cars and trucks took all their business away. My father worked in an ice plant when he was younger, and it’s fascinating how it worked, a large pool of salt water was chilled to 28 degrees in a roof top evaporator, and metal tubs of fresh water were lowered into it, an overhead hoist lifted them out after a day and 300 pound blocks were made.
After your tenth kid (no condoms) kids were kind of disposable, kids ran the streets, if they did not come home, there was another kid already on it way out the baby canal. just the way it was.
@@solardale715 , of course 6 of your first 8 died before they turned 4, so I guess you got used to them being disposable. Similar tradition from back in the day: You have a son. You name him John. John dies within the first few months. You have another son. You name him John. John dies a couple years later. You have a son. You name him John. He lives long enough for you to have another son. You name him Jim.
In college I worked at a video store, then later in a photo lab developing film. Now I'm a newspaper editor. So, yeah. I'm just going to tell my grandkids I was a pirate and a cowboy. It'll be easier than trying to explain to them that photos used to come on strips of chemically-treated celluloid, Netflix was a building with VHS cassettes in it and we printed out Google News on paper and delivered it to people's houses each morning.
I don't think future generation are somehow braindead about older technologies. Like we know how a telegraph works also we totally get technologies from the 1900s even 1800s. Your kids and grandkids will surely understand the technology we have today.
@@calamusgladiofortior2814 yar MATEY why don't you swab my poop deck=). BUT yeah im a truck driver right now and another 6 or 7 years when robo trucks are the thing ill be out of the job as well=(
Jeremiah Douglas Yeah, I read a report this week saying up to 25% of jobs in the U.S. are vulnerable to being replaced by automation of various sorts with current or emerging technology. I guess I might not be the only one taking up the pirate life. Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum... ;)
It's also why the individual wires on an ethernet connection are designated "Tx" and "Rx". Alot of people now believe that it stands for "Transmit" and "Recieve", but it dosen't and never really did. The "T" stands for the contact at the "Tip" of the jack. The "R" stands for the "Ring" contact near the base of the jack. And the "x" is a variable place holder for the number of the jack. So jack #1 on a switchboard would have two wires designated "T1" and "R1" connected to it.
@@royponpon1755 It would be more correct to say that this 'may' be where the Tx/Rx terminology originated, but this isn't what it means. Tx == transmit, Rx == receive, in electrical engineering anyway (which is where the ethernet discipline sits). You're right to say that, with jack plugs (the jack is the female by the way, the plug is the male) at least, Tx means Tip.x and Rx means Ring.x, but that doesn't translate to electrical engineering 'just' because they use the same symbol.
And before scanners were invented there were price stickers on each item and the cashier would key in the price. Then the cashier made change WITHOUT a calculator. The bagger also helped you load your car.
I asked for a raise at WalMart last time I was in there scanning my own shit. I refuse to shop there and when I do, I got to a warm body behind the till, that way I have human proof I paid for my purchase when they try to accost me when I leave.
Although the company’s will probably keep it around a bit longer because people could steal things a bit easier, and some people like talking to the cashiers and baggers, I am a bagger myself and many people have short conversations with us and like to discuss certain things going on, I enjoy that and they do to, obviously it’s going to be taken out eventually but it’ll be around longer than say a trucker or something like that, but yea you’re right
I'm from Scotland, it's pretty crap, so I moved to Bangkok. It gets dark at 18h30 every day, most of the side streets have very few lights and a lot of them don't have pavements. Oddly enough they call the place 'The city of Light'.
When I was a boy I wanted to be an elevator operator. The uniform was so smart, and it seemed the height of glamour to ride up and down in a department store all day.
"I can remember when it was the law that you had to keep your hands on the steering wheel in your automated car because people didn't trust computers to drive..."
Light For Japan Productions I saw somewhere a woman was talking about the moment she realized she was now old was when she told her kid to hang up the phone. The kid turned to her and asked why do y'all say that...she realized the kids now have never had to hang up a phone and the phrase was outdated we are old Hahahah
It will come sooner then you think, just RFID tag(smaller then a grain of rice) every product. Then people just push their kart thru a machine which scans everything as it goes thru and gives you the total. Once walmart thinks it will save them money in the states, they will implement it and it will force everyone else to do it, if they want to try to stay competitive. www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1146015
@@paris466 It might interest you to know, SparksFly, that I have a little bit of insight to your comment as I was working at a big retail store just a month ago. Large-scale automation is certainly in the works. The company that I worked for was already showing off the robots that they had which could scan the shelves, determine picks, check top-stock, & identify plugged products completely autonomously. Furthermore, they had robots that could unload trucks without any human intervention. These were both being tested in stores somewhere in the US. In fact, during the time that I worked at that store, they tested out a "scan & go" system, in which the customer would carry around a scanner while shopping, scan their object, & then simply pay their money & leave, spending almost no time at the already automated check out counter (the problem with that is the store has a very outdated client tracking infrastructure, so they couldn't figure out how to stop people from stealing without hiring more people). More to the point, the system that they're trying to push the hardest is an Online Grocery Pickup system, in which the customer places an order online, an employee goes out into the store & gets everythign for them, then they drive by & pick everything up without ever entering the store at all. Some stores within that same company, I've been told, have been doing the same but with a delivery system (ripe for automation in the coming years itself) as well. Basically, the wet dream for these retail companies is to transform their stores into warehouses -- one with no customers & as few workers as possible: stocked & organized by bots with customers picking their stuff up like a drive-through fast food restaurant, or having it delivered. & I'd say that, by in large, they can probably achieve their goal within the next 10-15 years.
My great grandma was a dispatcher for CHP for 45+ years. She retired and has her name on a gold placer under her picture from youth. I think it's so cool.
Think you hit it on the head a few videos ago....maybe 50 years from now people will look back and think we were crazy by not having cars drive on their own. Also, today, new drivers do not know the stuggle of pulling over and following road maps to get to your destination and folding those bad boys up again.
God help us all of somebody didn't fold dad's map up right. No bs in the late 80s my brother borrowed the car to goto a merchant marine open house thing. Except henwent to visit his gf at college. 2 things my brother didn't know. 1. She found a bf in every state she visited :( 2. You forget your aliby and cover-up when your figure out your h.s. sweetie is stupting someone else. Lucky for him someone tipped off my dad what happened and he was more disappointed at Jessica then my brother. Man, I never thought I would miss those days. My brother passed on since. Appreciate your teens and 20s, its cleche but true that you'll most likely miss that time the most.
People are worried because so many jobs will disappear in the next 30-50 years as AI becomes more sophisticated no career path will be is safe. Not even programing or computer repair will be safe. Society will have to fundamentally change at some point.
When I was very young (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) my father's company had a switchboard. I was so impressed when I saw it that I made one out of two shoe boxes and pencils tied on twine. Ah yes, the good old days.
Same with truck drivers. I have a friend from high school who became a truck driver, and when we asked him why he wanted to do it he said it was because he wanted the ability to say to his grandchildren that he was one of the last truckers.
My grandmother actually experienced the ice cutters era, she said that she remembers her father bringing home big ice cubes for them to use home. Pretty cool that she was able to experience it
All in all it wasnt that long ago, if he was born before the 1940s or on a poorer country than the united states or England she most likely experienced it, i still remember that lovecraft made a book about this terrible and terrifying new invention called air conditioner
@@carso1500 I remember a Three Stooges short where they were ice delivery guys and they had to take a big block of ice up a super steep set of stairs. Hilarity ensued. That was made in the 1930's, so not even a century ago.
@@HarryBuddhaPalm Yeah in 50 years people will question when watching a movie from today why there are some guys without arms and legs why not just get some cybernetic prosthetics? or why is everyone driving their cars did they not had self driving cars on the early 2000s? Just like how we now look weird at 2005 movies because of the lack of smarthphones and the not total and absolute prevalece of the internet we have now a days
my grandmother grew up in Erie Pennsylvania where they had a ice farm. They would cut up the ice fill a barn with ice and hay. She told me they use to sneak into the ice barn all the time.
I teach computer design among other things, and when I tell my students to save their work by pushing the button with the floppy disk on it, 70 to 80% have no idea what I'm talking about...
My experience goes back even a bit further. When I first started with computers, they were activated by either punch cards or perforated tape on big reels.
A more recently disappeared job is typesetters. In fact there's a whole lineup of jobs related to commercial printing that have gone - typesetters, paste-up artists, color separators, negative strippers, platemakers, etc. In the days before offset printing took over, typesetters worked on giant hot type machines that cast molten metal into lines of typography. And before that, typesetters would assemble lines of type by plucking metal slugs out of bins and assembling them in a composing stick. In fact there are still artisanal printers who do this. But once upon a time, this was how all type got done. It may sound laborious (and it was), but it was still much faster than copying books by hand.
Fast food will still most likely exist, it will all just be automated and you will be able to call for food from your smarth phone that will be delivered vía drone at your door, but i'm certain restaurants will still be a thing since they arent exactly a place to get food easier but they are more places to go out with friends or family
@@dunmermage You must live in New Jersey. The rest of the country has self service gas stations. Evidently, New Jersey doesn't trust it's citizens with guns or gas.
There was a time when several houses shared the same phone number. It was called a party line. You could listen in on other peoples conversations and if you picked up the phone and someone was on the line, you’d have to wait your turn.
Also, if you wanted to make a long-distance phone call or trunk call, you'd have to ask your local telephone operator to make the call to the call recipient's local switchboard, where their operator would then call that line and see if the person were available, then call back your operator to connect you. Your operator would then call you and connect the two of you together. This is why long-distance calls were so expensive, because they were so labor-intensive. I can personally remember long-distance calls from phone booths where the operator would tell you how much change to put into the phone for a very short call duration. If you ran out of time, the operator would cut in and tell you to deposit more change. If you listen to Jim Croce's "Operator" you get the idea of what really happened.
"Dialing in" is more of a honing concept used to input precise, position coordinates. In the case of telephones, a specific telephone number sequence. But the term "dial" became a noun as well when we started using circular controls to access points on a numerical or band width scale. ie a sun dial (older ref.), a radio dial, the dials used to affect trajectory, television dials. It was originally used only as a verb until these things came into public use. We like our Dials, they are everywhere still today!
One of my older uncles was an "Ice Man" back in the early 1900s. He had a special wagon that was packed with straw and rice hulls, lined with canvas. He would get up before dawn and ride to the ice house, pick up a load ice blocks, and then deliver it to houses on his route.
I'll be able to tell my grandkids that I used to deliver food when I was younger. I wonder which will shock them more: that it took a human to deliver food (or anything) or that they will know someone who knows how to drive all by themselves.
In the 50s my family lived near a factory that sounded a siren early in the morning to wake up the workers - who lived where they could hear the siren and walk to work.
As a 6 year old in the 1960s, I still remember my aunt having and ice-box. She had a regular refrigerator but still had an ice-box in the car-port. I clearly recall my uncle Rick putting several big blocks of ice in it on the day before Thanksgiving to help preserve pies and stuff she had made.
My husband's aunt remembers buying a block of ice in Arizona and putting it in a cage on the outside of the driver's side of their rental car before driving through the Arizona desert.
Small correction, Joe. The Knocker-Upper job still exists. Only I don't use a pea shooter, I've moved up to .50 BMG so I can do my route from home. As you can imagine, business has been rather slow lately..
I'm also still doing that job. I moved up from pea shooter to 138 db of Ramstein everymorning at about 5 am... The neibours are never late for work anymore.
This comment reminded me of an incident that I am far too proud to have been peripherally involved in. An asshole neighbor was put in place, no sound ordinances where violated, and reverie was involved. And a 1/2 scale cannon. Good times....
Link boys, I literally can picture Link showing up in his green tunic to help me navigate through the forest. I hope he's upgraded to a tempered sword.
Yeah I only know of cabooses from one that sits outside the train station where I live but they used to be on every freight train even after my parents were born
When I was little about 5 or 6 yrs old, my cousin and I would always hang out and play on the RR tracts and wait for the train , just to wave to the caboose guy. Yes, 55 years ago parents let their kids play on RR tracts!
I remember elevator operators in every department store, which are also disappearing. And department store window displays, especially downtown near Christmas.
First thing I thought of was the telephone switchboard operators. I work for the phone company and we use far less people than we did 20 years ago. I think with utilities like phone, power, gas, water, etc what if one day we don’t need people to place the lines, pipes, etc. What if we come up with more efficient ways. We are already converting most copper transmission to fiber optics and perhaps one day it won’t even be that. I do wish there were no overhead or buried cables everywhere. I thought the same thing about the knocker-ups. Both the pregnancy joke and then the window repair. As far as the ice - I worked a little in an ice house at Six Flags. They use to make their own ice and deliver it to the food and drink stands. We literally would have to shovel ice. Looking back on it, it wasn’t very sanitary. I’m glad they don’t that anymore
In China they have giant machines like robotic-trucks that lay chunks of road and railtrack in 20 metre long pre-made segments, it's allowed them to construct tens of thousands of miles of new infrastructure in just a decade.
Mobile networks are gaining more and more bandwidth every few years, meaning that maybe one day we won't need cables to transport information. Also, there are methods of wirelessly transmitting power, but I don't know much about that or how that can advance. I imagine though that in 100 years we may not use any cables at all. Unless it turns out that fibre optics are still more efficient across continents etc
I worked as a "pinsetter" in the early 60's although the title in for the job was "pin monkey" back then. It was probably the last of the non-automated bowling alleys in NYC. It was a combination bowling alley pool hall and bar. It didn't really require any great skill, you just had to be fast and small so you could get out of the way. Of course it was illegal for a kid to be doing it since the law back then forbade minors being in pool halls or bars without being accompanied by an adult. I think I lasted three weeks until my parents found out.
@@joescott Conversely, you could do a video on jobs that people don't realize still exist (like cowboys ... I'm always surprised people think cowboys don't still exist). Lol :)
@@joescott Yes for some weird reason this was the most interesting episode since I started watching you ( don't ask how long because I can't remember )
Here in Glasgow, Scotland there's still some guys who shout aloud to sell newspapers on the street, there's not many now, I feel that will be something of the past, as well as the newspaper industry as a whole.
The Capacitor when I first moved to Leeds in ‘96 they had Yorkshire post sellers on every street corner shouting “Eeeevnin post”. They’re nowhere to be seen now. Shame really. Rag and Bone men were also fairly common still back then, of course they would shout “Any old iron!?” While driving past with their horse and wagon. I thought it was weird then but when you (very rarely) see it now it’s truly bizarre- straight out of an episode of steptoe and son!
I am 59 and remember ICE boxes in Canada. My great uncle used one in the country. I was so curious he showed me the storage building not far from the cottage. I think it was in 1965.
They used to pull the iceblocks out of the lake (with what looks like draft horses from the pics I've seen) about 100 feet from my dock up here in central Ontario. When they tore down the ice house and blacksmith shop my wife's grandpa and great grandpa salvaged a boatload (literally) of lumber and built the boatsheds out of it.
I still use ice. I fill up a few 2ltr bottles with water and then leave them outside to freeze. Usually they'll supercool so when you pick them up they're still liquid until you give them a smack and watch the wave of ice crystallization move through the bottle. Then they sit in my fridge for a few days before going back out to freeze again. I don't think I'm saving any tremendous amount of power, but it's very little effort to be more sustainable and that electricity can light my house thanks to modern LEDs.
I worked in a building in the mid 80's that still had a manual elevator with an operator during the open hours. When I worked outside of those hours I had to operate the elevator myself. It definitely look some finesse to get it lined up just right.
I guess many industries won't exist for much time anymore, because of 3d printers. Like... Why would you buy a mug if you could print one the way you like it, maybe with some design that isn't even sold today?
I think you're right... personal 3D printers probably will upset a lot of global industries one day, but I think it might take longer than we all thought. I'm a huge tech nerd, & even I don't really want a 3D printer as they exist now... I'm not looking to print up plastic trinkets. Much more useful would be a general purpose printer -- something that could print in a wide variety of materials, equally suited to printing up a T-shirt or a pizza as it is to printing up a mug or a plate. Imagine a 3d printer that could print up electrical things like a working desk lamp, for instance. Something like that would be a true revolution in home 3D printing. As it currently stands, though, 3D printing is already making *huge* waves in industrial manufacturing, bringing down costs & making available more efficient designs left, right & center. So that's cool.
Given that 3D printers for now work with plastic I certainly wouldn't use that for a mug, we get enough microplastics in our systems already. Having 3D printed ceramics is a whole new level of difficulty so mug creators probably still have some good years left. And if you want a custom one, you can already order one with your own creatives even if you won't be able to change the mug model itself.
My family on my moms side ran an ice cutting business back in the day, they owned huge amounts of land with lakes that they cut ice from in the winter.
I have been BINGE watching your videos lately, and I'm OBSESSED! Your videos are great, and the way you talk about these subjects always lures me into them more! Love, love, love it! Definitely my favourite youtube channel :D
Fun fact, ice was also created by filling shallow reflective pools with water. At night the convention process would freeze the water, even when the temperature was above freezing.
Black ice is the bane of drivers in northern climates. Two or three degrees above freezing and there's a film of unseen ice on the roads by late evening. Horrible stuff.
Freezing happens because of radiation, not convection. At night, the radiation temperature of the clear sky can be up to -60 in perfect conditions. This means any upward facing surface gets colder then the ambient air temperature around it. Increased convection actually reduces this effect, warming it back up closer to air temperature. As a general rule, a clear sky makes the roads about 7° colder, so beware of any air temperature below 7°. Clouds absorb this effect.
I am an older person now and I did three of these jobs in my life time; Pinsetter, Elevator Operator and Switch Board Operator. Man, I sure do miss the Good Old Days.
Very entertaining! Utility meter readers/pretty much gone. It seems that anything analog is being replaced by digital. Examples: volt/ohm meters, air pressure gauges, calipers. All gauges need a calibration periodically. Most people don't realize this, and assume that when a number is displayed, THAT's IT! There was a saying I heard in college: it's better to be approximately correct then precisely wrong. Somethings just stick with with me. Have a good new year!
Analogue gauges are and will be important safety devices. CE norms state that every halfconducter must be assumed to fail in some point and safe operation is to be preserved electromechanically. As long as safety is a thing, analogue gauges, mechanical switches and similar stuff will always be a thing. And calibration is also a thing we rely on in every case.
@@OneTrueScotsman Even though the building I live in was built in 2017, these guys have to show up to read the electricity meter, but they only have to show up every 5 years, the other years they send a letter and let me fill in the reading.
I was a pin setter when I was around 12 to 14! It was awesome! The second pic you had up was what it was like for me. I had a specific team I set for (I don't remember their name), and they paid me $20 plus tips to set once a week, twice a week during the summers a few times and on a couple of special occasions. I had a lot of fun with the other kids. I need to see if it's still there, I still live nearby! I'm 37 for reference.
@@automaticninjaassaultcat3703 It will most likely still have a lot of computer assistance to avoid accidents, I'm not expecting to see fully manual cars outside of closed tracks in, say, 20 years.
TheLastScampi driving manually will be even illegal, with auto pilot cars traffic will be so efficient and fast that putting a human being behind the wheel would be a suicide. Intersections with no pedestrians involved won’t even have traffic lights, cars can communicate with each other and handle that much more efficient than simple color coded lights.
My great Aunt was a switchboard operator for BellSouth. She was management by the time she retired. It must have been so neat to actually be there for all the changes in technology. She passed away in 2010 at age 83 and she never stopped being fascinated by the world around her.
Gramma told a story about riding out with her dad to watch men cut ice from a lake and load them on horse-drawn sleighs. Around the time I heard this, I also had just found out she was a feisty redhead, so I picture it as a scene from Anne of Green Gables.
I’m in the printing trade and so was my father and grandfather and it’s pretty amazing and scary how many jobs have disappeared from that industry in as little as 40 years
When my grandma was a kid in France (in the late 40s), there was a milk guy who would deliver milk in glass bottles. You would put the empty bottles outside your house with coins in them and the guy would collect them early in the morning and change them with full bottles. There were also guys going from villages to villages to sharpen your tools. She said they used to walk around and they had a small trailer pulled by a German shepherd with sharpening tools inside. This is just hilarious!
Milk men were still a thing all over Britain right up until the mid 2000’s. Nowadays the dairy will go around in a van and a few young lads will jump out and deliver the milk. Is it really that archaic elsewhere in the world?
Those tool sharpening guys were still a thing in Germany a couple of years ago - about twice a year I had a little flyer of one of those traveling sharpeners among my snail mail spam. I guess he went out of business because I preferred to go to the local knife shop who has better quality equipment.
As long as their are repressive income based taxes, there will be a market for "creative" accountants... :) Hopefully, we will switch to a strictly consumption based tax system and all the people at the IRS will need to go find *honest* jobs.
0:34 *"A knocker up is not somebody that you pay to get someone pregnant ..."* But that begs the question: is there _actually_ a job where you pay someone to get someone pregnant? And if so what's it called?
When I was a kid I read an article that on some island there's a job to de-virginise new wives, so that the husband doesn't have to deal with it himself. I don't remember exact details at this point, but it stuck in my mind as something shocking. 😁
My father grew up in Newcastle (northern England) and he told me about knockers. His father was a coal trimmer for the local shipyard. As I recall it was the shipyard who paid for the service.
"You've got to stop selling these for a dollar a bag, WE LOST THREE MORE MEN ON THIS EXPEDITION!" "If you can find a better way to find ice I'd like to hear it!" *grumble grumble*
I still arrange my long-distance road trips by the light of the full moon during wintertime. I live in Canada and our winter nights can be quite long, and driving on dark remote roads can be dangerous at night, especially with low visibility. When the full moon is out and the light reflects on the white snow, it gets really bright!
I was recently in Myanmar and actually saw ice cutters going around to self built communities to sell them blocks of ice! It was neat to see a part of life that seems so foreign in the US
I grew up in northern New England, and talked to a lot of people over the years about the ice harvest and 1) if you go around to country diners and inns the walls are often decorated with the saws and picks used for ice and you can still occasionally find a guy old enough ho participated 2) it was such a big deal that according to multiple folks the ships would leave the maine coast with ice and come back via Jamaica full with stuff as random as diamond ore and conch shells. The conch were button ore, and there are still a few factories standing that did nothing but drill buttons out of seashells. Seashell button driller, job #7. You should do one on ice though, and maybe get hold of a real icebox. They're usually beautiful and way more effective than you'd think if used them right.
In the UK, if you picked up the phone, a woman would say ' little boy, put the receiver back - stop playing with the telephone'. Well, they did when I was young anyway. When I started work, I wired up Manual Exchanges that those operators used. The shocks came from the 50 volt ringing current by the way. Quite a belt... Here are a few other old jobs - May be UK only. Bread delivery man. Rag and Bone man. Knife sharpener Umbrella repair man Shoe shine 'boy' Butler - and all the rest of the household staff.. TV repair man ( anything repair man ) Telephone installer - now internet Soon - Post person. Driver Teacher Local Doctor Gas/electric meter reader. Possibly actors and TV presenters ! Plenty more for another show :-)
Knife sharpeners still work in the food industry! I remember having one come around at my old job within the last decade or so. Usually double as salesmen to make ends meet.
Knife sharpeners are still a thing. They will come to your house and tune up your knives. Google it. It isn't expensive either. Still see shoe shiners in nice hotels and outside subways, but not many young ones. Butler: The job title has changed, but not the duties. TVs don't get repaired as often but phones and computers do. I even know of a few vacuum cleaner repair places. They will also fix anything related that runs off household current from stand mixers to rewiring lamps. Every home has a telephone line installed when it's built. The RJ11/12 jack eliminated the requirement to hardwire the phone to the wall. Your ISP will send someone out to install new service. I did hook up my own replacement cable modem last time and just called in the unique identifier. That idiot on the other end of the line "uninstalled" my phone modem instead of the old cable internet modem and I had to fix _that_ with a call over a cell phone. The gas/electric meter reader disappeared with smart meters. The water meter is still read by a person.
Tere ton of repair man around (TV, computer smartphone), they haven't been automated, it just that people buy new stuff, instead of repairing them, company didn't help them either, making repair harder and pricier!
@Davvy Jannes Teacher and Doctor don't just '''talk' to people they have to explain thing give orders, react to event, computer don't that very well especially interacting with human in the real world, i could see translator and TV presenter being replaced with neural network program, but not doctor, or teacher, people tend to overestimating today AI capabilities (and calling every thing AI) because of click-bait article about it!
There's actually a music venue in Phoenix Arizona called "The Icehouse" because back in the day it was an ice house. In a city that sees multiple 110f+ days during the summer, with 115f to 120f not being out of the question. That's 45c with 48c to 50c on the most brutal days, for our metric friends 😎
In Ramadan (a month in lunar hijri calendar aka islamic calendar) muslims fast. When someone fasts he or she shouldn’t eat or drink from dawn to dusk. Back in old days there were some people who woke up others before dawn to prepare for fasting. In some villages in Iran they still do this as a tradition. Thank you Joe for another great video.
That's cool. So maybe you've heard this question before. I've never heard an answer. In placed like Alaska (where I live) do you follow the dawn to dusk routine or do you use a clock set to another countries time zone? If so, where?
Very well-insulated with sawdust. My family got our own ice in the cellar there was an extra deep part that would be filled up with ice and sawdust about 15 ft by 15 ft by 10ft I believe.
There is one type of call center agents that seems to have gone out already, at least it's my impression: Nobody calls with questionnaires about customer satisfaction anymore, I think social media data trade kinda made it obsolete.
One of my favorites I learned on TED is the US Whaling Industry. Before oil was discovered in Texas in 1901, the largest source of lamp oil was whales. So future whale populations were saved by...entrepreneurs and evolving technology. But we didn't make laws to save the displaced sailors then, so I take issue with doing it now.
@@michab.r.1854 I'm referring to making laws that try to artificially impede or prevent technology or progress. If your job is George Jettson and you push buttons every day with no thought or engagement into what your making, that's a job that's waiting to get replaced by an engineering solution. I think the same with solar. If I produce my electricity over buying coal, why would I want to protect that industry?
My Grandfather starting before WWI followed by my uncles and my dad worked the ice through the '30s and '40s until they were old enough to drop out of school and join the Army for WWII.
God, don't you hate the younger generations nowadays? When I was a kid, we didn't have fancy stone tools for survival. Back in my day, we had our hands, and chased down prey. These kids can't even run that fast! What a shame of a wasted generation.
HA back in my day we didnt even have hands, we had to beat our prey to death with our arms like you would a club, and we ripped it apart with only our teeth, god i sure do hate kids these days
Millennial are killing every industry! Why should businesses adapt to new consumer demographics, it should be the kids that learn how to be just like their patents! Rabble rabble rabble
"I wish I had a phone, I wish I had a home, to have one in, if I did have one on"....actual lyric from a song circa 1997, which this video made me think of
the question is: who woke up the knocker upper?
Ori Shahar another knocker upper
Tiqonn OW
then who woke up that one?
Ori Shahar person who didn’t sleep
There mom. "Wake up you Id...t go and crack some widow glass."
who knocked up the knocker upper.
My mother used to be a switchboard operator, and she's only 62 - she was kind of offended when we were in a history museum and there was a switchboard just like she used to use, haha
My mother was also a switchboard operator. Which history museum was this?
My great aunt too, she said they would listen to the conversations, but she would tune out cause they were really boring
I worked a switchboard (badly) in the 60s when I had a summer job as a hotel receptionist. And I'm with T's mother too - perfectly normal, everyday stuff classed as antiques? C'mon!
I'm 58 and the telephone equipment I started out as an apprentice on in 1981 Strowger is also in a Museum :-) I also have one of those first mobile phones I recovered from a skip back in 92 is now a collectors piece. I think programming the video recorder was harder than my job now as a cyber consultant.
@@The_True_one
Downtown L.A. not mom, my sister!
I wonder if “big ice” campaigned against refrigerators.
Cool though
"Big ice" was the first to buy refrigeration units. They were big complex machines only economical for large operations. Many people still had ice boxes and ice delivery for decades after that.
I forget all the details, but the railroad created the ice industry. Ships carried it too, but it was the railroads that allowed ice to get to every small town and whistle stop in the US. They built huge warehouses that were double walled, and filled with sawdust and they stacked it full of ice from the Great Lakes. Double walled train cars did the same, and they put blocks of ice in train cars of perishable items. Then they started to carry train cars of ice to sell the ice. But, then a southerner invented refrigeration. And ice plants popped up in every small town. These ice plants still loaded train cars, but they also sold ice locally, and the ice from the Great Lakes was suddenly worthless. Ice could be made all year round and they didn’t suffer such great losses during the summer. Originally they had to cut about 4 times as much ice as they sold, so it would last all Summer. It was probably the late 50’s or early 60’s before they stopped selling ice door to door, and people bought refrigerator freezers for their homes, in numbers that eliminated the need for door to door ice. I recall the local ice plant in the town I live in was operating after I was married in the early 80’s, they made the ice sold at stores or you could go buy large blocks of it at the plant. Now, I think the bags of ice we see at local stores are made by a machine, that makes those round ice pieces we now see, no large plant is needed. And refrigerated train cars and trucks took all their business away. My father worked in an ice plant when he was younger, and it’s fascinating how it worked, a large pool of salt water was chilled to 28 degrees in a roof top evaporator, and metal tubs of fresh water were lowered into it, an overhead hoist lifted them out after a day and 300 pound blocks were made.
@@alphagt62 a bit old, but thought I'd say thanks for that comment, some interesting points I hadn't thought about or looked into.
otakuman706 thanks! I think I saw a TV special about it on PBS, that’s where I learned all those details.
So a child would escort an adult home with a torch, then he'd extinguish the torch and walk back alone in the dark. 🤦
After your tenth kid (no condoms) kids were kind of disposable, kids ran the streets, if they did not come home, there was another kid already on it way out the baby canal. just the way it was.
@@solardale715 , of course 6 of your first 8 died before they turned 4, so I guess you got used to them being disposable. Similar tradition from back in the day: You have a son. You name him John. John dies within the first few months. You have another son. You name him John. John dies a couple years later. You have a son. You name him John. He lives long enough for you to have another son. You name him Jim.
When they weren't doing that, they were setting off explosives in coal mines.
Humanity has the maternal instinct of a... a... welp, not much, literally any animal I'm thinking of is more protective.
I love this comment!
In college I worked at a video store, then later in a photo lab developing film. Now I'm a newspaper editor. So, yeah. I'm just going to tell my grandkids I was a pirate and a cowboy. It'll be easier than trying to explain to them that photos used to come on strips of chemically-treated celluloid, Netflix was a building with VHS cassettes in it and we printed out Google News on paper and delivered it to people's houses each morning.
I don't think future generation are somehow braindead about older technologies. Like we know how a telegraph works also we totally get technologies from the 1900s even 1800s. Your kids and grandkids will surely understand the technology we have today.
@@RezwanNavide I know, I was just making a joke at my own expense. Apparently I like careers in fields which are on the cusp of becoming obsolete.
@@calamusgladiofortior2814 yar MATEY why don't you swab my poop deck=). BUT yeah im a truck driver right now and another 6 or 7 years when robo trucks are the thing ill be out of the job as well=(
Jeremiah Douglas Yeah, I read a report this week saying up to 25% of jobs in the U.S. are vulnerable to being replaced by automation of various sorts with current or emerging technology. I guess I might not be the only one taking up the pirate life. Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum... ;)
Have you considered getting into shipping freight? As youre collecting soon-to-be dead careers apparently
The plugs used for switchboards gave us the guitar jack and by evolving smaller, the earphone jack.
It's also why the individual wires on an ethernet connection are designated "Tx" and "Rx". Alot of people now believe that it stands for "Transmit" and "Recieve", but it dosen't and never really did. The "T" stands for the contact at the "Tip" of the jack. The "R" stands for the "Ring" contact near the base of the jack. And the "x" is a variable place holder for the number of the jack. So jack #1 on a switchboard would have two wires designated "T1" and "R1" connected to it.
And now we have Bluetooth.
Yielded many early plugs. We still use a similar version on the spark plug cables used in combustion vehicles.
@@royponpon1755 It would be more correct to say that this 'may' be where the Tx/Rx terminology originated, but this isn't what it means. Tx == transmit, Rx == receive, in electrical engineering anyway (which is where the ethernet discipline sits). You're right to say that, with jack plugs (the jack is the female by the way, the plug is the male) at least, Tx means Tip.x and Rx means Ring.x, but that doesn't translate to electrical engineering 'just' because they use the same symbol.
Adrian, that's why their still called phone plugs/jacks to this day.
people use to scan your groceries and put in a bag for you
At least the bagger was never a thing i germany as far as i know. I always thought it was just an american thing.
And before scanners were invented there were price stickers on each item and the cashier would key in the price. Then the cashier made change WITHOUT a calculator. The bagger also helped you load your car.
I asked for a raise at WalMart last time I was in there scanning my own shit. I refuse to shop there and when I do, I got to a warm body behind the till, that way I have human proof I paid for my purchase when they try to accost me when I leave.
Although the company’s will probably keep it around a bit longer because people could steal things a bit easier, and some people like talking to the cashiers and baggers, I am a bagger myself and many people have short conversations with us and like to discuss certain things going on, I enjoy that and they do to, obviously it’s going to be taken out eventually but it’ll be around longer than say a trucker or something like that, but yea you’re right
@@humorouspickle8827 you do know how essential truck drivers are ?
"Imagine getting home from a pub in pitch black because there are no streetlights" yeah, I've been to Scotland
Scotland must have changed quite a lot recently then. I never heard of anyone in Scotland actually going home from a pub.
@@KaeYoss When I was a student in Scotland the pubs closed at 2230 (instead of 2300 so a lot of English students got caught out by the closing time).
I'm from Scotland, it's pretty crap, so I moved to Bangkok. It gets dark at 18h30 every day, most of the side streets have very few lights and a lot of them don't have pavements. Oddly enough they call the place 'The city of Light'.
I’m Scottish 🥺 do other places have more light?
@@emmaharkins everywhere else has more light than you
When I was a boy I wanted to be an elevator operator. The uniform was so smart, and it seemed the height of glamour to ride up and down in a department store all day.
"I can remember when it was the law that you had to keep your hands on the steering wheel in your automated car because people didn't trust computers to drive..."
Response: "What's a steering wheel?"
@@ezicarus8216 What are cars?
What are computers? We are one. Resistance is futile.
lol exactly
Light For Japan Productions I saw somewhere a woman was talking about the moment she realized she was now old was when she told her kid to hang up the phone. The kid turned to her and asked why do y'all say that...she realized the kids now have never had to hang up a phone and the phrase was outdated we are old Hahahah
I think grocery store cashiers. We already have self check out lanes, I think in the future all the lanes will be automatic.
If you get rid of those fucking weight scale things. I always need a cashier to reset that because something is going wrong with it.
It will come sooner then you think, just RFID tag(smaller then a grain of rice) every product. Then people just push their kart thru a machine which scans everything as it goes thru and gives you the total. Once walmart thinks it will save them money in the states, they will implement it and it will force everyone else to do it, if they want to try to stay competitive.
www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1146015
Along with the people who stock the shelves. Someday you'll walk into a store and there will be maybe 1 or 2 actual human beings
@@twn5858 The machine could just weight what you took from the stands.
@@paris466 It might interest you to know, SparksFly, that I have a little bit of insight to your comment as I was working at a big retail store just a month ago. Large-scale automation is certainly in the works. The company that I worked for was already showing off the robots that they had which could scan the shelves, determine picks, check top-stock, & identify plugged products completely autonomously. Furthermore, they had robots that could unload trucks without any human intervention. These were both being tested in stores somewhere in the US. In fact, during the time that I worked at that store, they tested out a "scan & go" system, in which the customer would carry around a scanner while shopping, scan their object, & then simply pay their money & leave, spending almost no time at the already automated check out counter (the problem with that is the store has a very outdated client tracking infrastructure, so they couldn't figure out how to stop people from stealing without hiring more people).
More to the point, the system that they're trying to push the hardest is an Online Grocery Pickup system, in which the customer places an order online, an employee goes out into the store & gets everythign for them, then they drive by & pick everything up without ever entering the store at all. Some stores within that same company, I've been told, have been doing the same but with a delivery system (ripe for automation in the coming years itself) as well.
Basically, the wet dream for these retail companies is to transform their stores into warehouses -- one with no customers & as few workers as possible: stocked & organized by bots with customers picking their stuff up like a drive-through fast food restaurant, or having it delivered. & I'd say that, by in large, they can probably achieve their goal within the next 10-15 years.
My grandmother was a phone operator, she is still alive at 92 yrs
God bless her.
Nice!
That is epic.
My great grandma was a dispatcher for CHP for 45+ years. She retired and has her name on a gold placer under her picture from youth. I think it's so cool.
Think you hit it on the head a few videos ago....maybe 50 years from now people will look back and think we were crazy by not having cars drive on their own. Also, today, new drivers do not know the stuggle of pulling over and following road maps to get to your destination and folding those bad boys up again.
Yeah, I was never good at that.
The only way to fold a map is differently.
God help us all of somebody didn't fold dad's map up right. No bs in the late 80s my brother borrowed the car to goto a merchant marine open house thing. Except henwent to visit his gf at college. 2 things my brother didn't know.
1. She found a bf in every state she visited :(
2. You forget your aliby and cover-up when your figure out your h.s. sweetie is stupting someone else.
Lucky for him someone tipped off my dad what happened and he was more disappointed at Jessica then my brother.
Man, I never thought I would miss those days. My brother passed on since. Appreciate your teens and 20s, its cleche but true that you'll most likely miss that time the most.
imagine having to control your speed with the throttle instead of the push of a button.
People are worried because so many jobs will disappear in the next 30-50 years as AI becomes more sophisticated no career path will be is safe. Not even programing or computer repair will be safe. Society will have to fundamentally change at some point.
When I was very young (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) my father's company had a switchboard. I was so impressed when I saw it that I made one out of two shoe boxes and pencils tied on twine. Ah yes, the good old days.
I remember when I was a little girl in Glasgow, Scotland watching the gas lighters light the street lamps.
2069:
Me: Back in the days, Joe Scott was a famous UA-camr!
My grandkid: What the hell is a UA-camr?
2070:
Me:Back in the days, my friend was a soldier!
My grandchild: What on earth is a soldier? we have drones grandpa, we don't need soldiers.
Yooo if my grandbaby cussed at me, I'd smack their ass into the next century 😂😂
@@lilhoss2627 I hate you
@@iain8829 you dont need to the kid would probably call child services and he would get his ass whooped
Who's Joe?
Cab/bus drivers for sure will be a thing of the past.
Wiledex there already are auto metro trains
Same with truck drivers. I have a friend from high school who became a truck driver, and when we asked him why he wanted to do it he said it was because he wanted the ability to say to his grandchildren that he was one of the last truckers.
I think every type of chauffeur. Truck drivers, pizza or package delivery people, transport drivers, etc.
When street lights were first put in there were some who hoped the lights would end all street crime ...
I think taxis are going to be around for a while longer.
My grandmother actually experienced the ice cutters era, she said that she remembers her father bringing home big ice cubes for them to use home. Pretty cool that she was able to experience it
All in all it wasnt that long ago, if he was born before the 1940s or on a poorer country than the united states or England she most likely experienced it, i still remember that lovecraft made a book about this terrible and terrifying new invention called air conditioner
@@carso1500 Yeah we live in a caribbean island and her father owned a shop so she was able to see it happen often.
@@carso1500 I remember a Three Stooges short where they were ice delivery guys and they had to take a big block of ice up a super steep set of stairs. Hilarity ensued. That was made in the 1930's, so not even a century ago.
@@HarryBuddhaPalm Yeah in 50 years people will question when watching a movie from today why there are some guys without arms and legs why not just get some cybernetic prosthetics? or why is everyone driving their cars did they not had self driving cars on the early 2000s? Just like how we now look weird at 2005 movies because of the lack of smarthphones and the not total and absolute prevalece of the internet we have now a days
my grandmother grew up in Erie Pennsylvania where they had a ice farm. They would cut up the ice fill a barn with ice and hay. She told me they use to sneak into the ice barn all the time.
I teach computer design among other things, and when I tell my students to save their work by pushing the button with the floppy disk on it, 70 to 80% have no idea what I'm talking about...
floppy disk drives when floppy really ment FLOPPY had to have a folder just to keep them in so thay WOULD not flop around
I told what the save icon actually is to my friend and he didn’t even know what a floppy disk was.
He'll I'm 16 and I know what a floppy disk is I'll probably chalk that up to my interest in old technology though
My experience goes back even a bit further. When I first started with computers, they were activated by either punch cards or perforated tape on big reels.
Wow haha!
A more recently disappeared job is typesetters. In fact there's a whole lineup of jobs related to commercial printing that have gone - typesetters, paste-up artists, color separators, negative strippers, platemakers, etc. In the days before offset printing took over, typesetters worked on giant hot type machines that cast molten metal into lines of typography. And before that, typesetters would assemble lines of type by plucking metal slugs out of bins and assembling them in a composing stick. In fact there are still artisanal printers who do this. But once upon a time, this was how all type got done. It may sound laborious (and it was), but it was still much faster than copying books by hand.
News papers will soon be gone!
My first job in printing I did negative stripping and plate making. My Dad was a pin setter in high school.
My dad gets super tense if someone keeps the refrigerator door open for 5 seconds, I can imagine him freaking out guarding those ice boxes
Future: people used to work at automated food stops. They called it fast food back then
Fast food will still most likely exist, it will all just be automated and you will be able to call for food from your smarth phone that will be delivered vía drone at your door, but i'm certain restaurants will still be a thing since they arent exactly a place to get food easier but they are more places to go out with friends or family
Automats....what is old is new again...
Who remembers when a gas station attendant would pump your gas for you?
I do, it was several hours ago. I live in New Jersey.
Roland White And clean your windshield 🤗
Uhhh... you mean, like, today? I don't think I *ever* saw a gas station without attendants.
@@dunmermage You must live in New Jersey. The rest of the country has self service gas stations. Evidently, New Jersey doesn't trust it's citizens with guns or gas.
@@BoTwerdowsky When we moved out of state Mom had to learn to pump gas, lol!
There was a time when several houses shared the same phone number. It was called a party line. You could listen in on other peoples conversations and if you picked up the phone and someone was on the line, you’d have to wait your turn.
Also, if you wanted to make a long-distance phone call or trunk call, you'd have to ask your local telephone operator to make the call to the call recipient's local switchboard, where their operator would then call that line and see if the person were available, then call back your operator to connect you. Your operator would then call you and connect the two of you together. This is why long-distance calls were so expensive, because they were so labor-intensive. I can personally remember long-distance calls from phone booths where the operator would tell you how much change to put into the phone for a very short call duration. If you ran out of time, the operator would cut in and tell you to deposit more change. If you listen to Jim Croce's "Operator" you get the idea of what really happened.
joe watching you has brought me alot of peace these past few months and i just wanted to take a second and say thanks,
I thank you too Joe ☺️
Isn't it funny how we still say we "dial" a telephone number, when most phones haven't had dials for decades
A lot of people still refer to video recording of something as taping.
Even audio recordings are still called taped.
"Dialing in" is more of a honing concept used to input precise, position coordinates. In the case of telephones, a specific telephone number sequence. But the term "dial" became a noun as well when we started using circular controls to access points on a numerical or band width scale. ie a sun dial (older ref.), a radio dial, the dials used to affect trajectory, television dials. It was originally used only as a verb until these things came into public use. We like our Dials, they are everywhere still today!
Just like even though we don't use tapes people still say rewind
There's sufficient stuff and stories in phones with actual dials and how to hack them for a new video. Joe?
@@agerven That's more of a ua-cam.com/channels/y0tKL1T7wFoYcxCe0xjN6Q.html ua-cam.com/video/rmkbudWbQ9A/v-deo.html
One of my older uncles was an "Ice Man" back in the early 1900s. He had a special wagon that was packed with straw and rice hulls, lined with canvas. He would get up before dawn and ride to the ice house, pick up a load ice blocks, and then deliver it to houses on his route.
"He doesn't know how to use the 3 seashells."
I cant believe Joe did not catch that and give you a heart,lol
@@robertwoko4395 I'm just glad anybody noticed it and understood.
I still think it was funny how the Schwarzenegger was a past president who was first governor of California.
😅
Now that's funny as I myself sit on the toilet lol
I'll be able to tell my grandkids that I used to deliver food when I was younger. I wonder which will shock them more: that it took a human to deliver food (or anything) or that they will know someone who knows how to drive all by themselves.
There used to be people who would say "OK Boomer".
Then they got old.
Ok boomer
Ok boomer
Ok boomer
@They_Call_Me_ Pebbles they call everyone who disagrees with them boomers I got called a boomer and I'm 23 lmao
Boomers are literally specific to a generation of people in a specific era of time. So, this only applies to you.
What a boomer thing to say 🙄
In the 50s my family lived near a factory that sounded a siren early in the morning to wake up the workers - who lived where they could hear the siren and walk to work.
My in laws live in Guyana where an alarm currently tells everyone in the sugar cane fields different specific times.
We have an elevator operator here. Last man standing. He’s been doing it for 50 years.
It's a good business if you get in on the ground floor.
@@wickedcoolname399 it has its ups and downs I imagine....
@@boxedfender4810 really elevating story
Jim McCracken in a small town in southern Oregon.
Has he gone up or down in the world?
As a 6 year old in the 1960s, I still remember my aunt having and ice-box. She had a regular refrigerator but still had an ice-box in the car-port. I clearly recall my uncle Rick putting several big blocks of ice in it on the day before Thanksgiving to help preserve pies and stuff she had made.
My husband's aunt remembers buying a block of ice in Arizona and putting it in a cage on the outside of the driver's side of their rental car before driving through the Arizona desert.
Small correction, Joe. The Knocker-Upper job still exists. Only I don't use a pea shooter, I've moved up to .50 BMG so I can do my route from home.
As you can imagine, business has been rather slow lately..
I'll send you a list of names addresses to "knock up"
Switch to drones.... With scary clown faces...
I'm also still doing that job. I moved up from pea shooter to 138 db of Ramstein everymorning at about 5 am... The neibours are never late for work anymore.
@@PCLHH Du...
Du Hast...
Du Hast To
Du Hast To Get Up Now.
This comment reminded me of an incident that I am far too proud to have been peripherally involved in. An asshole neighbor was put in place, no sound ordinances where violated, and reverie was involved. And a 1/2 scale cannon.
Good times....
- My dad was a professional knocker-up.
- Did he go around a wake up people?
- What you talking about?
That joke is also sexual.
If only you could make it a profession nfl players would be in the Bloomberg 500
Ahhh... The evolution of the knocker upper
Link boys, I literally can picture Link showing up in his green tunic to help me navigate through the forest. I hope he's upgraded to a tempered sword.
The caboose train guy is gone now...... I miss the caboose guy waving from the train. He was replaced by a computer
Brakeman.
But, on trains where security is required, a caboose is still used.
Yeah I only know of cabooses from one that sits outside the train station where I live but they used to be on every freight train even after my parents were born
When I was little about 5 or 6 yrs old, my cousin and I would always hang out and play on the RR tracts and wait for the train , just to wave to the caboose guy. Yes, 55 years ago parents let their kids play on RR tracts!
@@whatwhat8524 Yes, much safer than parents today who let their kids "play with" drugs!
I remember elevator operators in every department store, which are also disappearing. And department store window displays, especially downtown near Christmas.
First thing I thought of was the telephone switchboard operators. I work for the phone company and we use far less people than we did 20 years ago. I think with utilities like phone, power, gas, water, etc what if one day we don’t need people to place the lines, pipes, etc. What if we come up with more efficient ways. We are already converting most copper transmission to fiber optics and perhaps one day it won’t even be that. I do wish there were no overhead or buried cables everywhere.
I thought the same thing about the knocker-ups. Both the pregnancy joke and then the window repair. As far as the ice - I worked a little in an ice house at Six Flags. They use to make their own ice and deliver it to the food and drink stands. We literally would have to shovel ice. Looking back on it, it wasn’t very sanitary. I’m glad they don’t that anymore
In China they have giant machines like robotic-trucks that lay chunks of road and railtrack in 20 metre long pre-made segments, it's allowed them to construct tens of thousands of miles of new infrastructure in just a decade.
Mobile networks are gaining more and more bandwidth every few years, meaning that maybe one day we won't need cables to transport information. Also, there are methods of wirelessly transmitting power, but I don't know much about that or how that can advance. I imagine though that in 100 years we may not use any cables at all. Unless it turns out that fibre optics are still more efficient across continents etc
@CrazyAssDrumma I’m pretty sure the wireless power thing has something to do with electro magnetic waves?
I was wondering how safe the ice from the rivers and likes was to consume. Probably mostly used to cool iceboxes, not for consumption though.
@@joescott rivers and likes? lol
I worked as a "pinsetter" in the early 60's although the title in for the job was "pin monkey" back then. It was probably the last of the non-automated bowling alleys in NYC. It was a combination bowling alley pool hall and bar. It didn't really require any great skill, you just had to be fast and small so you could get out of the way. Of course it was illegal for a kid to be doing it since the law back then forbade minors being in pool halls or bars without being accompanied by an adult. I think I lasted three weeks until my parents found out.
Hey Joe, can you do other episode like this please.
On jobs that have gone away?
Maybe extremely dangerous jobs that have gone away.
@@joescott Conversely, you could do a video on jobs that people don't realize still exist (like cowboys ... I'm always surprised people think cowboys don't still exist). Lol :)
@@joescott Yes for some weird reason this was the most interesting episode since I started watching you ( don't ask how long because I can't remember )
@@joescott and/or jobs predicted to go away! There must be hundreds!
Here in Glasgow, Scotland there's still some guys who shout aloud to sell newspapers on the street, there's not many now, I feel that will be something of the past, as well as the newspaper industry as a whole.
The Capacitor when I first moved to Leeds in ‘96 they had Yorkshire post sellers on every street corner shouting “Eeeevnin post”. They’re nowhere to be seen now. Shame really. Rag and Bone men were also fairly common still back then, of course they would shout “Any old iron!?” While driving past with their horse and wagon. I thought it was weird then but when you (very rarely) see it now it’s truly bizarre- straight out of an episode of steptoe and son!
[Looks at thumbnail]
"So, smoking crack used to be a job, huh?
I thought that was the nail of the little finger? (EDIT: nvm, I think that's cocaine. Don't inject marijuanas kids.)
I am 59 and remember ICE boxes in Canada. My great uncle used one in the country. I was so curious he showed me the storage building not far from the cottage. I think it was in 1965.
They used to pull the iceblocks out of the lake (with what looks like draft horses from the pics I've seen) about 100 feet from my dock up here in central Ontario. When they tore down the ice house and blacksmith shop my wife's grandpa and great grandpa salvaged a boatload (literally) of lumber and built the boatsheds out of it.
I still use ice. I fill up a few 2ltr bottles with water and then leave them outside to freeze. Usually they'll supercool so when you pick them up they're still liquid until you give them a smack and watch the wave of ice crystallization move through the bottle. Then they sit in my fridge for a few days before going back out to freeze again. I don't think I'm saving any tremendous amount of power, but it's very little effort to be more sustainable and that electricity can light my house thanks to modern LEDs.
@Ian M Hello Ian. Canada can have warm / hot summers!
@Ian M Even here in Finland there is 1 special day each year which is not that cold, apparently there is supposed to be 4 seasons of the year? ;)
@@skaltura Back when I was younger, if Summer came on a weekend we'd have a picnic.
I'd love to see the episode for ice, i actually had a conversation with my 89 year old grandmother about it once. Love to know the full story
I worked in a building in the mid 80's that still had a manual elevator with an operator during the open hours. When I worked outside of those hours I had to operate the elevator myself. It definitely look some finesse to get it lined up just right.
I guess many industries won't exist for much time anymore, because of 3d printers. Like... Why would you buy a mug if you could print one the way you like it, maybe with some design that isn't even sold today?
Could you 3d print ceramic?
I wouldn't want a plastic mug
I think you're right... personal 3D printers probably will upset a lot of global industries one day, but I think it might take longer than we all thought.
I'm a huge tech nerd, & even I don't really want a 3D printer as they exist now... I'm not looking to print up plastic trinkets. Much more useful would be a general purpose printer -- something that could print in a wide variety of materials, equally suited to printing up a T-shirt or a pizza as it is to printing up a mug or a plate. Imagine a 3d printer that could print up electrical things like a working desk lamp, for instance. Something like that would be a true revolution in home 3D printing.
As it currently stands, though, 3D printing is already making *huge* waves in industrial manufacturing, bringing down costs & making available more efficient designs left, right & center. So that's cool.
Given that 3D printers for now work with plastic I certainly wouldn't use that for a mug, we get enough microplastics in our systems already. Having 3D printed ceramics is a whole new level of difficulty so mug creators probably still have some good years left. And if you want a custom one, you can already order one with your own creatives even if you won't be able to change the mug model itself.
@@NUTTY-nw4ed Not yet. Just plastic. For now.
Guys, I didn't mean today. I meant soon. 3d printing still need to get a lot better. 😊
"They took ourrr jeerbbbss!"
My family on my moms side ran an ice cutting business back in the day, they owned huge amounts of land with lakes that they cut ice from in the winter.
I was a switchboard operator in 1973.
@Jim McCracken I turned 23 in Aug of that year.
My father was still a kid in '73
I was hatched in '73.
i misread that as 1793
my grandfather was a yugoslavian soldier in 1973, father was also 14
I have been BINGE watching your videos lately, and I'm OBSESSED! Your videos are great, and the way you talk about these subjects always lures me into them more! Love, love, love it! Definitely my favourite youtube channel :D
Fun fact, ice was also created by filling shallow reflective pools with water. At night the convention process would freeze the water, even when the temperature was above freezing.
I award you Coolest Factoid for this video.
Black ice is the bane of drivers in northern climates. Two or three degrees above freezing and there's a film of unseen ice on the roads by late evening. Horrible stuff.
Freezing happens because of radiation, not convection. At night, the radiation temperature of the clear sky can be up to -60 in perfect conditions. This means any upward facing surface gets colder then the ambient air temperature around it. Increased convection actually reduces this effect, warming it back up closer to air temperature.
As a general rule, a clear sky makes the roads about 7° colder, so beware of any air temperature below 7°. Clouds absorb this effect.
@@Serastrasz Are you challenging Mr Ortiz for the Coolest Factoid award? Very well then, swords at the ready gentlemen, and.........begin!
@@Serastrasz Thanks, the OP made no sense to me but your explanation does make sense.
I remember when everyone owned ice picks. Ya, I’m old
Margaret, Theophilus OK BOOMER
Woah, that's actually pretty cool. Didn't know that one!
Now the only people that own an ice pic is a mass murderer
Pocket knifes in school. Every boy in Jr High got one at 13. It was a rite of passage.
I have two of them. I have a counter top ice maker and the ice I put into the freezer has to be broken up to use.
I am an older person now and I did three of these jobs in my life time; Pinsetter, Elevator Operator and Switch Board Operator. Man, I sure do miss the Good Old Days.
Very entertaining! Utility meter readers/pretty much gone. It seems that anything analog is being replaced by digital. Examples: volt/ohm meters, air pressure gauges, calipers. All gauges need a calibration periodically. Most people don't realize this, and assume that when a number is displayed, THAT's IT! There was a saying I heard in college: it's better to be approximately correct then precisely wrong. Somethings just stick with with me. Have a good new year!
Good point!
Analogue gauges are and will be important safety devices. CE norms state that every halfconducter must be assumed to fail in some point and safe operation is to be preserved electromechanically. As long as safety is a thing, analogue gauges, mechanical switches and similar stuff will always be a thing.
And calibration is also a thing we rely on in every case.
@@OneTrueScotsman Even though the building I live in was built in 2017, these guys have to show up to read the electricity meter, but they only have to show up every 5 years, the other years they send a letter and let me fill in the reading.
Porn has ruined my mind, when I hear someone say BBC, I no longer think of British broadcasting corporation.
snouty snouterson that’s sick
@@andersoni.7472 someone with papa franku as an avatar calling out perversion. Bwha.
Tsin Lao lol I’m not that fucked up
I don’t get it? What does the BBC have to do with porn?
@@whiterol it's an acronym for a body part of a well endowed black man, Big, Black, .....
I was a pin setter when I was around 12 to 14! It was awesome! The second pic you had up was what it was like for me. I had a specific team I set for (I don't remember their name), and they paid me $20 plus tips to set once a week, twice a week during the summers a few times and on a couple of special occasions. I had a lot of fun with the other kids. I need to see if it's still there, I still live nearby! I'm 37 for reference.
Driving will be obsolete. People will be amazed at the fact we put our lives in danger every day.
@@automaticninjaassaultcat3703 It will most likely still have a lot of computer assistance to avoid accidents, I'm not expecting to see fully manual cars outside of closed tracks in, say, 20 years.
TheLastScampi you will have to pay insurance premium to enable manual drive in your car 😂
I look forward to having a car being able to drive in the city during a snow blizzard, but that won't be happening any time soon.
@@automaticninjaassaultcat3703 yep, maybe it'll be as weird as seeing that one guy riding a unicycle around town.
TheLastScampi driving manually will be even illegal, with auto pilot cars traffic will be so efficient and fast that putting a human being behind the wheel would be a suicide. Intersections with no pedestrians involved won’t even have traffic lights, cars can communicate with each other and handle that much more efficient than simple color coded lights.
Taxi and Uber/Lyft drivers are on their way out. Truck drivers too
My great Aunt was a switchboard operator for BellSouth. She was management by the time she retired. It must have been so neat to actually be there for all the changes in technology. She passed away in 2010 at age 83 and she never stopped being fascinated by the world around her.
This is the first video of Joe's where i already knew over 80% of the content
Yes, I had an uncle who broke his foot in an ice house!!
Who’s joe?
Gramma told a story about riding out with her dad to watch men cut ice from a lake and load them on horse-drawn sleighs. Around the time I heard this, I also had just found out she was a feisty redhead, so I picture it as a scene from Anne of Green Gables.
I was thinking of frozen, b/c they did that in that beginning
So your grandma was Anna from Frozen?
I’m in the printing trade and so was my father and grandfather and it’s pretty amazing and scary how many jobs have disappeared from that industry in as little as 40 years
When my grandma was a kid in France (in the late 40s), there was a milk guy who would deliver milk in glass bottles. You would put the empty bottles outside your house with coins in them and the guy would collect them early in the morning and change them with full bottles. There were also guys going from villages to villages to sharpen your tools. She said they used to walk around and they had a small trailer pulled by a German shepherd with sharpening tools inside. This is just hilarious!
Yup I remember the milkman and the breadman, in the 60's in Canada.
There were used until the 80s or maybe even 90s in Poland, you see them in the 80s movies
Milk men were still a thing all over Britain right up until the mid 2000’s. Nowadays the dairy will go around in a van and a few young lads will jump out and deliver the milk. Is it really that archaic elsewhere in the world?
Those tool sharpening guys were still a thing in Germany a couple of years ago - about twice a year I had a little flyer of one of those traveling sharpeners among my snail mail spam. I guess he went out of business because I preferred to go to the local knife shop who has better quality equipment.
Unfortunately I think my job, Accountancy, will soon be automated and gone. Oh well.
Colm Coakley you didn’t want to do that job anyway, right? Grow vegetables and relax!
As long as their are repressive income based taxes, there will be a market for "creative" accountants... :) Hopefully, we will switch to a strictly consumption based tax system and all the people at the IRS will need to go find *honest* jobs.
As a software developer in fintech and blockchain, I'm sorry, I'm trying not to work too fast.
Just cuz I’m 16 doesn’t mean I’ve never used a land line
0:34 *"A knocker up is not somebody that you pay to get someone pregnant ..."*
But that begs the question: is there _actually_ a job where you pay someone to get someone pregnant? And if so what's it called?
A surrogate doctor? Lol
A wife
Just a joke don’t kill me
When I was a kid I read an article that on some island there's a job to de-virginise new wives, so that the husband doesn't have to deal with it himself.
I don't remember exact details at this point, but it stuck in my mind as something shocking. 😁
It exists called a natural insemination donor.
A stud.
My father grew up in Newcastle (northern England) and he told me about knockers. His father was a coal trimmer for the local shipyard. As I recall it was the shipyard who paid for the service.
How about years from now they think it is funny that we manually drive a car ourselves. LOL. Great video as always Joe!
"You've got to stop selling these for a dollar a bag, WE LOST THREE MORE MEN ON THIS EXPEDITION!"
"If you can find a better way to find ice I'd like to hear it!"
*grumble grumble*
Yeeeahh Boiii!!!... Joe Scott drops another awesome video and makes my fugging day for the win..
That's what I do.
I know where a bowling alley is in Ontario that still requires a pin setter. Each team has one
I want to know how many windows were broken by over-zealous and/or hungover Knocker-ups.
choronos
Over zealous blow hards !
Seriously though.
they compensate damage out their paychecks
around 17 windows
Rather then tapping on glass most people would replace one of them with wood or metal to both give a safer spot to hit and a louder sound.
I still arrange my long-distance road trips by the light of the full moon during wintertime. I live in Canada and our winter nights can be quite long, and driving on dark remote roads can be dangerous at night, especially with low visibility. When the full moon is out and the light reflects on the white snow, it gets really bright!
Yup, watch out for the moose, eh?
Sounds awesome. I'd love to live there.
Remember when people would study for years, sometimes their entire lives, just to make a painting?
Why didn't switchboard operators wear insulated gloves??? 😑😑😑😑😑😑
Because no one cared to make it more comfortable.
Because the plugs had insulated parts - you only got a shock when you held the contacts while the phone was being 'rung' - 50volts AC.
@@tortysoft A bit of trivia: Those are the same plugs that we know as 1/4" phono plugs/jacks that are used for headphones and instrument cables.
@@Markle2k Correct 😊
@@tortysoft Right! And as pappa always said, when you complained that something you did hurt: "Well, don't do that next time"
I'm new to the channel and enjoy it so far
I found Joe's channel in August and he's done so many great videos it's well worth checking them out 😊
He's my favourite UA-camr
Awe, thanks you guys!
Grocery shopping is a process that's undergoing rapid changes. There will come a day when cashiers are no longer necessary.
I was recently in Myanmar and actually saw ice cutters going around to self built communities to sell them blocks of ice! It was neat to see a part of life that seems so foreign in the US
I grew up in northern New England, and talked to a lot of people over the years about the ice harvest and 1) if you go around to country diners and inns the walls are often decorated with the saws and picks used for ice and you can still occasionally find a guy old enough ho participated 2) it was such a big deal that according to multiple folks the ships would leave the maine coast with ice and come back via Jamaica full with stuff as random as diamond ore and conch shells. The conch were button ore, and there are still a few factories standing that did nothing but drill buttons out of seashells. Seashell button driller, job #7.
You should do one on ice though, and maybe get hold of a real icebox. They're usually beautiful and way more effective than you'd think if used them right.
Damn. I am old enough to remember all those telephones. Even when they were made of wood.. As we lived in a backward rural area.
rationalguy Cool!
In the UK, if you picked up the phone, a woman would say ' little boy, put the receiver back - stop playing with the telephone'. Well, they did when I was young anyway.
When I started work, I wired up Manual Exchanges that those operators used. The shocks came from the 50 volt ringing current by the way. Quite a belt...
Here are a few other old jobs - May be UK only.
Bread delivery man.
Rag and Bone man.
Knife sharpener
Umbrella repair man
Shoe shine 'boy'
Butler - and all the rest of the household staff..
TV repair man ( anything repair man )
Telephone installer - now internet
Soon - Post person.
Driver
Teacher
Local Doctor
Gas/electric meter reader.
Possibly actors and TV presenters !
Plenty more for another show :-)
Knife sharpeners still work in the food industry! I remember having one come around at my old job within the last decade or so. Usually double as salesmen to make ends meet.
Knife sharpeners are still a thing. They will come to your house and tune up your knives. Google it. It isn't expensive either.
Still see shoe shiners in nice hotels and outside subways, but not many young ones.
Butler: The job title has changed, but not the duties.
TVs don't get repaired as often but phones and computers do. I even know of a few vacuum cleaner repair places. They will also fix anything related that runs off household current from stand mixers to rewiring lamps.
Every home has a telephone line installed when it's built. The RJ11/12 jack eliminated the requirement to hardwire the phone to the wall.
Your ISP will send someone out to install new service. I did hook up my own replacement cable modem last time and just called in the unique identifier. That idiot on the other end of the line "uninstalled" my phone modem instead of the old cable internet modem and I had to fix _that_ with a call over a cell phone.
The gas/electric meter reader disappeared with smart meters. The water meter is still read by a person.
Teachers, Actors and Presenters will stay, just like Nurses. If their job is Talking to People, it's staying.
Tere ton of repair man around (TV, computer smartphone), they haven't been automated, it just that people buy new stuff, instead of repairing them, company didn't help them either, making repair harder and pricier!
@Davvy Jannes Teacher and Doctor don't just '''talk' to people they have to explain thing give orders, react to event, computer don't that very well especially interacting with human in the real world, i could see translator and TV presenter being replaced with neural network program, but not doctor, or teacher, people tend to overestimating today AI capabilities (and calling every thing AI) because of click-bait article about it!
Oh, yeah. I remember. Dial phones, operaters, and party lines
There's actually a music venue in Phoenix Arizona called "The Icehouse" because back in the day it was an ice house. In a city that sees multiple 110f+ days during the summer, with 115f to 120f not being out of the question. That's 45c with 48c to 50c on the most brutal days, for our metric friends 😎
It makes me feel good about our heat waves here in Australia 👍
When I was little I wanted to be a switchboard operator. I was so sad when it stopped being a thing
In Ramadan (a month in lunar hijri calendar aka islamic calendar) muslims fast. When someone fasts he or she shouldn’t eat or drink from dawn to dusk. Back in old days there were some people who woke up others before dawn to prepare for fasting. In some villages in Iran they still do this as a tradition.
Thank you Joe for another great video.
In Turkey it's still a thing and they get paid by the neighborhood in Eid.
I remember this when I was leaving with my grandma. They were listening to the rosters as well.
That's cool. So maybe you've heard this question before. I've never heard an answer. In placed like Alaska (where I live) do you follow the dawn to dusk routine or do you use a clock set to another countries time zone? If so, where?
@@grannykiminalaska - I'm no expert, but I think they have to start and end at a specific time of day in places with no daylight.
@@Mosern1977 very interesting
Very well-insulated with sawdust. My family got our own ice in the cellar there was an extra deep part that would be filled up with ice and sawdust about 15 ft by 15 ft by 10ft I believe.
Driving is probably next up in the job extinction list... then accountants... then call center agents. 😂
There is one type of call center agents that seems to have gone out already, at least it's my impression: Nobody calls with questionnaires about customer satisfaction anymore, I think social media data trade kinda made it obsolete.
One of my favorites I learned on TED is the US Whaling Industry.
Before oil was discovered in Texas in 1901, the largest source of lamp oil was whales. So future whale populations were saved by...entrepreneurs and evolving technology. But we didn't make laws to save the displaced sailors then, so I take issue with doing it now.
You take issue with making laws to protect people? Or?
@@michab.r.1854 I'm referring to making laws that try to artificially impede or prevent technology or progress. If your job is George Jettson and you push buttons every day with no thought or engagement into what your making, that's a job that's waiting to get replaced by an engineering solution.
I think the same with solar. If I produce my electricity over buying coal, why would I want to protect that industry?
lol "younger viewers" I have always had a landline and I am 17. a landline is still useful today as an emergency call system.
You know it's a good video when 12 minutes felt like 5 x)
Great video as always, Joe :)
I wonder for how long there will be taxi and truck drivers.
Greetings, raBit.
As a machinist I have seen crazy automation that has taken the entire departments from 20 people to 1 using robotic arms to load machines
When it’s 2019 and you still think nsa recording Americans is still a joke
Well the joke is on you.
I was watching movies from the 40’s and I was so confused by the purpose of switch board operators. What a time...
My Grandfather starting before WWI followed by my uncles and my dad worked the ice through the '30s and '40s until they were old enough to drop out of school and join the Army for WWII.
God, don't you hate the younger generations nowadays?
When I was a kid, we didn't have fancy stone tools for survival. Back in my day, we had our hands, and chased down prey. These kids can't even run that fast! What a shame of a wasted generation.
HA back in my day we didnt even have hands, we had to beat our prey to death with our arms like you would a club, and we ripped it apart with only our teeth, god i sure do hate kids these days
Millennial are killing every industry! Why should businesses adapt to new consumer demographics, it should be the kids that learn how to be just like their patents! Rabble rabble rabble
"I wish I had a phone, I wish I had a home, to have one in, if I did have one on"....actual lyric from a song circa 1997, which this video made me think of
If I had a million bucks, Id still be out robbing armored trucks.
When I’m the only one of my friends who knows what a rotary phone is 😂
Remember _party lines?_ 😊
Great video !
What about buggy-whip manufactures?
They still use them, and they are still around
Obviously you've seen "Other People's Money"
Pin makers on the other hand...