Looked like they still had a stoker.
But yeah I don’t imagine there’s much more than this sort of specialty demand.
My wife used to work as a photo typesetter, which seems to have completely succumbed to computer digital publishing.
The Canadian government dictionary of occupations used to list Gunner* as an occupation, but it disappeared from the listings decades ago, presumably due to changes in manufacturing methods.
*Operated a “gun puffing” machine making puffed cereals.
VCR Repairmen
I can think of three pieces of media I’ve seen in the past 5 years where just the idea of somebody being a VCR repairman in current times was a complete joke/oddity and the repairmen themselves had to go through illegal means to keep afloat.
@Bookkeeper: Bookkeeper in the sense of hand-written ledgers and journals is pretty much dead. Certainly the same ideas live on almost unchanged in software, so the data organization and data entry work of the bookkeeper is pretty the same as it ever was.
But the neat red penmanship, the big books, the eternal arithmetic, and the green eyeshades have gone, well, the way of green eyeshades.
The IBM proof machines I worked with had absolutely no capability to print anything on any check. You’re probably referring to a later development and a much different machine.
I think you underestimate the power of optical scanners today. Even the Post Office uses them to read handwritten addresses. Not perfect, but they can read almost anything. Humans only get the worst ones to interpret.
Not me and my friend Robert. We were bona fide Newsies!
“Getcher Daily Sentinel hee-yah!” “Pres-ee-dent slams Speee-ker of da Hay-ouse, read about it right nay-ow!”
Oh, and by the way, I’ve done bona fide metal typesetting (tres hipster now) and bona fide blacksmithing (but not horseshoes, that’s a ferrier).
Before the middle of the Twentieth Century, a computer was an actual person who plugged numbers into equations and calculated the results. There were often rooms full of people who did this for a living, such as this computer room: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer#/media/File:Human_computers_-_Dryden.jpg (NACA was the predecessor to NASA).
Milkman? Iceman?
Milkmen still exist. You can even place your orders online now with some of them.
Ice delivery still exists as well, though they mainly target folks planning events like weddings and large barbecues.
You seem to have mistaken the 1960 figures in Table 1 for current ones. (And why you think Table 3, which assesses horse breed distribution among registered Thoroughbred and similar horses in a recent 15-year period, is relevant as a source of information about total equine population decrease over the past century eludes me.)
There are, as I noted, estimated to be somewhere between 9 and 10 million horses in the US at present. That’s over one-third of the 1915 peak population of around 26.5 million.
Yes, that’s a dramatic drop, but it’s by no means equivalent to becoming “obsolete” or “vestigial”. Grooms as an occupation are simply not dying out the way, say, lamplighters and steam locomotive stokers and steel puddlers have died out, because there are still a hell of a lot more horses than non-electric street lamps and steam locomotives and puddling furnaces.
Sheesh.
On a related note, coal passers (steamboat stokers), are no longer around. Even the few steam powered boats on the Great Lakes converted to automatic coal feeds by the 1960s.
If there are any boats still using coal passers, (probably river boats used as museums or tourist cruises–the last coal fired ship on the Great Lakes is the ferry Badger that probably always had automatic coal feed), they would definitely fit the category of “niche/artisanal.”
We still have 5 employed in London. Light brigade: carrying the torch for London's last gas street lamps | Heritage | The Guardian
VCR repair would be one category that a general electronics repair person would work on. Just because one type went away doesn’t mean all types did.
OTOH, modern electronics are virtually disposable upon first failure so repair shops have mostly, but not completely, disappeared. There are still places that scrounge for stuff at thrift shops and garage sales, fix them and sell them to working poor folk.
But a lot of stuff just isn’t worth it. A few months ago I checked out for the first time a PC repair business I pass by a lot. The guy had, for example, several tablets for sale. All less powerful and more expensive than a $50 Amazon Fire Tablet. Ditto other stuff: desktops, laptops, etc. I think virus removal and such is they only way he can stay afloat. Didn’t seem to be in the phone screen repair business which is in fairly decent demand.
Back around 1998 I took a weeklong river cruise on File:DeltaQueenRacing.jpg - Wikipedia. (Dumb VBulletin; ignore the smiley in the url. Clicking it still works.)
The boat and the company have since ceased operations.
When I rode her she still had the original 1900s-era dual expansion piston steam engine. The paddle really was the prime mover.
But the boiler was fired by diesel fuel and had been since at least the 1970s if not earlier. So no stokers.
Pssst…If you check “Disable smilies in text” option while composing a post, you won’t have that dumb problem.
Thank you. I did not know that. Or rather I’d seen the checkbox but hadn’t made the connection that it was applicable to this situation.
Ooh, good one ! Another related profession : the knocker-up. Short-lived profession since they existed after factories and strict time-keeping but before individual alarm clocks, their job was to go out and bang on people’s window with a long stick to wake them up in the morning so they could be at the factory bright and early.
Flash programmers.
Actually, the fuel used on the DQ was Bunker C (AKA #6 fuel oil) which was one step up from tar; it was heated to make to move through the pipes better. I think she was built that way.
I was going to question the burning of bunker oil. But I looked at the picture. blacking out like that does look like bunker “c”. Oops.
True bunker “c” needs to be heated to at least 130 degrees to pump it and around 180 degrees to atomize it properly in the burner. And if you spill a little while changing a burner the spilled oil may burn. Or if you spill it in a bilge water will float on top of it.