They would not of had a stoker, but a fireman. His job would be stoking the fires, and maintaining water levels and boiler pressure. Along with watching the Left (?) side of the track.
I’m definitely not competent to say one way or the other. I can’t honestly say now whether the crew described it as burning “oil” or “Diesel oil”.
But I can say that in normal operations, including initial acceleration from a standstill, it wasn’t leaving a heavy black trail like in that pic I linked. That strikes me as them “coal rolling” for the cameras in some way.
A Google image search for [“delta queen” steamboat] returns a lot of pix of it underway leaving the sort of trail you’d expect from a modern diesel-powered boat like a tugboat: slightly sooty but mostly brown exhaust looking. The search will also return lots of pix of other steamboats that aren’t the DQ.
Once a common sight in American cities the guys who patroled the streets cleaning up horse shit are now part of a long-defunct profession. It was estimated in 1908 that New York City alone contained 120,000 horses. Can you imagine how much crap they produced each day? The manure, if not speedily cleaned up, was a potential health hazard, attracting swarms of flies.
I think the cleaners were called White Wings because of their white uniform.
Elevator operator is a nearly defunct position, although there still may be some in high-end buildings. In the 1970s my summer job was as an elevator operator of manual elevators (operated by a switch instead of pressing buttons). There probably aren’t any of those left any more, at least in public use.
My defunct profession was a pin setter at a bowling alley after school. I doubt if any lanes still have manual pin-setting anymore. I also used to manally load clay pigeons at a trap-shoot.
I figured there had to be a “vintage” bowling alley someplace that still had them:
That’s duckpin rather than regular 10 pin, but they still have manual pinsetters.
There’s an electronics repair store near my home that has a well-worn sign that says “WE FIX: Computers - Televisions - Microwave Ovens”. When I went in there as a customer, I said, “Who gets their microwave fixed nowadays?” He replied that those under-the-counter units are not exactly disposable, and they do a lot of work on restaurant microwaves.
They had a couple of TVs for sale in the waiting room, presumably not picked up for whatever reason.
blacking out on a boiler is from too little air. Either the fireman was a little slow on increasing the forced draft fans. Or if the boiler is natural draft and the fireman rapidly increases the firing rate too quickly. On steady state steaming it is easier to maintain an economy haze in the stack.
Do fullers, tuckers and walkers (in the making of woolen cloth) still exist? Or have their jobs been eliminated by automation or by changes in the manufacturing process? Fulling - Wikipedia
You can see one at the end of the animated intro to “Peabody’s Improbable History”. 
OK, you’re old! You must be referring to proof machines used in the early 80’s and prior. Since that time the machines, in addition to sorting the checks, also print the amount keyed by the operator on to the MICR line of the check.
OCR technology is not there yet, not to the level needed by the financial industry, as evidenced by the continued existence of proof operator jobsin all banks.
I think this must be it. This pub is close to the River Wandle which used to have something like 90 mills of various types along its length, including paper mills.
If you search for “Rag Beating” then the term comes up as part of the paper-making process; I guess the pub lodger preferred the sound of “smash”
I can name two or three hospitals in my home town that began as sanitaria and have been in continuous operation since. :rolleyes:
True. Barrels used to be the default shipping container for bulk goods - as evidenced by the name of that chain restaurant with the folksy, general store ambience.
There were even sub-categories of cooper - dry coopers, who made barrels that would contain nails and stuff, and the more exacting wet coopers, who made barrels that would contain liquid. Probably not many dry coopers around these days - corrugated cardboard is SO much cheaper.
♫ So dress your ranks, lift your pikes,
Tight as the teeth of a comb.
Rattling, clanking down the road
The War is going home ♫ …
Leslie Fish - Serious Steel
Tell that to the folks in the rural Southwest. Yersinia pestis is alive and well and living in your local prairie dog colony
Milk delivered by a milkman is available where I live. Iceman, you may have a point.
If you count quasi-museums, which continue to have working industrial diaplays, no profession will ever cease to exist. I recently saw a video of a guy who demonstrates a Mergenthaler linotype machine at a museum. I once worked for a newspaper that used one, and the most amazing hours of my life were sitting there watching the operator run the machine.
We get milk delivered every week to our door. It’s local, fresh, relatively cheap and convenient.
One relativey recent profession become defunct:
If you were stuck on a game you’d call a hotline and an “expert” would give you tips to get you past where you were stuck. You’d pay a fee for the service. These days 5 seconds on Google will give you the same result.
Nintendo finally retired the service for good in 2005. I doubt anyone is trying to offer that service anymore anywhere. I can’t find anything at least.
Infectious disease continues to be a very active specialty, albeit one of the lowest paid.