Well, not hired. Pure collectors were freelance, selling buckets of turds to tanneries rather than recieving a salary or hourly wage. You could make a fairly decent wage at it if you had a regular source. Surprisingly, to modern sensibilities, this was considered to be a “higher” profession than rag or bone collectors.
Here excerpt from a book called* Labour and Poor*, 1849-50 by Henry Mayhew.
The metal window screen is a modern invention.
Relect on this, in terms of manure, houseflies and high summer heat.
Keep the windows closed to keep swarms of flies out, & roast.
Keep em open, & get eaten alive.
BTW–I do not want to live in “the good old days”, 'cause they weren’t!
This is discussed extensively in Barbara Freese’s book Coal, which obviously focuses primarily on the subject of its title but has some good general discussions of air quality in London and elsewhere. Sample excerpt:
There’s a lot more in the book. Recommended reading for anyone interested in the history of energy and industry and their impact on quality of life.
any reports from mac. island mich.?
that is one place in the u.s. that uses horse driven locomotion. granted the horses are used mostly in the non-snow months…but there aren’t many places on the island where you can get away from the smell.
I recall reading a stat that, based on 1970s car volume, if all the cars magically turned to horses, the freeways of LA would be 80 FEET deep in manure at the end of the first day.
A bit of a disposal problem.
Perhaps. If the horses were 1000-foot high behemoths with a diet of Taco Bell and Ex-Lax. Do you really believe that “statistic”?
Not just tanners & bootblacks. When you look at Rembrandt’s amazing use of light and shadow, you’re looking at a surface masterfully smeared with shit.
In some’s opinion, he got a little too carried away with it (possibly NSFW)
As we’ve learned from Cecil Adams, the brown in feces is from dead red blood cells. Before modern chemistry, we took our pigments where we found them.
There’s something mentioned in the Little House books, called mosquito-bar. I always interpreted it as a fine netting, and it’s used to cover windows and doors. Did they not have it in the early 19th? When was it invented? Was it not in general use?
No, it is a form of mosquito netting, to be draped over a sleeping person in bed.
This brings up an interesting point - they had mosquito-bar in the 19th century. They also had fine mesh wire domes that they placed over food to keep the flies out (you can see some of these at places like Sturbridge Village, that recreate 19th century life), so why not put such screens, or even coarsely woven cloth (coarse enough to not block ventilation, but fine enough to keep out flies) over windows? Certainly the fact that they had these kinds of products shows that they had the technology. (And you wouldn’t have to put it over all windows – as anyone can tell you, having just one or two windows open – but with screens – makes an enormous difference from the syifling stuffiness of no open windows).
I asked the folks at Sturbridge about this once – they were cooking in a country kitchen, and the place was swarming with flies, except for the dishes covered with flyscreens – and they said that flies were simply accepted as part of life, and nobody even thought of trying to block them.
Of course, that’s not the impression you get from the opening number of 1776, with the debate about open or closed windows in Congress. That scene was adapted from real life – there was a stable around the corner, and in summer the horseflies were intolerable in Congress.
Maybe 8 feet? or 80 inches…
80 feet seems quite much.
A stat like that would have to take into account the mileage (per vehicle day) and compare that to mileage (per horse day). If vehicles travelled 40 miles per day and horses 4-6 miles per day you’d have to take the average horse dung excreted and muliply it by a factor to make it equivolent to the car’s travel.
So, were probably talking between 6-10 times the dung (which an earlier post stated was between 5-15 kilo’s of dung per day would turn into 40-120 kilos per day multiplied by about 4 million cars.
Splitting the difference between 40-120 gives us 80 kilos/day * 4 million = 320,000,000 kilos per day of dung. Now divide that by the square footage of street in LA (I haven’t the foggiest) and you’d be close to an answer.
Why, Sir–nobody of any quality summers in the city!
One goes to one’s little place in Newport. Or perhaps to one’s camp in the Adirondacks.
Did the Victorians ever have swimming competitions in the thames, at London? I can’t imagine that any of the rivers in England were fit for swimming at that time!
The good old days were not “clean old days!”
Maybe, but there were times when you were in the city that you’d like to have the windows open, even aside from the hottest and sultriest days of the summer. It gets warm in April, May, and early June
Mesg metal screens could be made, but at a cost that was prohibitive. It’s one thing to make one a couple of square feet in area to cover a bowl, and another to make one large enough to cover a single window.
Cloth was possible, but I think flies were just accepted as part of life (no germ theory).
You only need a couple of square feet to fill a frame that fits in a window opened part way. I had such a screen on my window back in my pre-air-conditioned stident days. Certainly not beyond the creativity and ability of 19th century farmer-inventors. Especially guys like the ever-inventive Shakers.
And you could always use “panes” of tin pierced with holes – that’s how they made “pie safes” , and some lanterns. All you’d have to do is increase the number of holes. Work – but not prohibitively hard or expensive.
I have t assume t falls in the bin of “everyone accepted it, so it wasn’t seen as necessary.” A cultural blind-spot. But I’m still surprised that the annoyance factor didn’t prompt someone to come up with this. You don’t need to have a Germ Theory of Disease to become exasperated with biting horseflies.
I don’t know how accepted they were, given the amount of mentions in housekeeping books of the day regarding how to combat them.
One was to place saucers around the room containing sugar and cream which would trap and drown the flies. (There were also various commercial fly traps which work on the same principle.) I have also heard mention of coating cedar boughs in molasses or other sticky sugar mixture and hanging it from the ceiling as a fly trap. I even have seen suggestions to add laundry bluing to paint because it supposedly repells flies.
Wealthy people would have a servant using a “fly swisher” over their heads during dinner parties. Flyswatters made of mesh were commonly available. Some sources mention burning a little pot of herbs as a repellent, but this doesn’t seem to be as common.
As are Congressmen, even today. 
