How Ordinary People Worked in Jobs That No Longer Exist | Boring History for Sleep (2 Hours)

Every episode of Boring History for Sleep, in one playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNE0lFUqJ5VA If tonight's history helps you rest, a like and a comment help this quiet channel reach the next listener. Two quiet hours with nine trades that a machine, a wire or a rule quietly ended, told in the order they disappeared, from the men cutting ice on a frozen pond in the eighteen forties to the last lighthouse keeper rowing ashore. We stand on the ice at Walden in the winter of 1846 while a hundred men saw it into blocks, walk a lamplighter's round through gas-lit streets, sit in a newspaper composing room at night while a compositor sets type by hand, listen to the reader in a Tampa cigar factory, camp beside a Maine river with the log drivers, cross a measuring room at Harvard where women counted the stars on glass plates, sit at a night switchboard through the small hours, ride an office elevator after the building has emptied, and end in a lighthouse watch room with the 1881 regulations open, where the whole of a night is written down as a timetable. Every figure, wage, date and rule in the narration comes from a primary document we opened and read: Thoreau's account of the ice cutters, the 1880 census of the social statistics of cities, the Maine Bureau of Industrial and Labor Statistics, the printing trade press of 1897, the Immigration Commission's 1911 report on the cigar factories, Williamina Fleming's own 1893 paper, the Women's Bureau bulletin on the change to dial telephones, the Bureau of Labor Statistics union scales, and the Light-House Board's Instructions to Light-Keepers. The full list of sources is in our comment below the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhqroOA0bRY&lc=UgwtYi6JyBEqQWtceQB4AaABAg Key sources Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "The Pond in Winter", on the ice cutters of 1846: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/205/pg205.txt Tenth Census of the United States, Report on the Social Statistics of Cities, Part II, 1880