Og wonder why kids stand in line to hear Music with Rocks in it. Og not do that when kid. Og go out and kill mammoth. Uphill both ways.
^ Get off Og lawn!
And there were wall-mount models too, and, after 1954, you could get your phone in colors other than black. Plus the Princess & Trimline versions were mostly non-black.
I remember news reports in the early 70s of people camping outside London department stores before the January Sales, and it seemed a well established thing by then. I well remember a woman who was after a particular fur coat and was greeted by management with champagne for a photo op. She then went outside the store and promptly burned the coat as a protest against the fur trade.
They had massive catering systems, I doubt there was much more queuing than in a modern high school cafeteria
An early example of fake news apparently.
Ben Franklin worked that trick a few decades earlier.
In Aztec times, captured prisoners were probably queued for days, awaiting their turn to climb the pyramid for sacrifice, heads rolling down to the adoring crowds, bodies rolling back to the butchers because animal protein shortage (no livestock).
A queue is also a Manchurian pigtail but so what?
Queue area - Wikipedia says “The first written description of people standing in line is found in an 1837 book, The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle described what he thought was a strange sight: people standing in an orderly line to buy bread from bakers around Paris.”
Prior queueing was thus either undocumented or nonexistent because shoving greedyguts.
I think you’re probably right. There are plenty of historical examples of supplicants waiting in the court of a patron for days, going back to the Roman forums and probably earlier. But they most likely weren’t lined up. Instead, they were somewhere within the court trying to work their way through the system established by the courtiers to be seen by the patron. Pilgrims on the other hand had limited options for accelerating their access to a shrine, and unless they were part of the elite, would have had to queue.
A toilet? (Or outhouse?) it’s “non-essential” cuz there’s probably a tree or shrubbery nearby that’d do the trick!
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For days?:dubious:
I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned the Oklahoma Land Rush in 1889. While not the earliest example, it certainly was one of the largest. Granted, many of the settlers were on horseback or in wagons, but they were effectively standing around waiting for the land to be opened. And most of them were waiting for several days (or weeks).
Yeah, when you remember this condition of the OP it makes some posts weird or, in this case, humorous.
And the bathroom.
That’s what 2+ holers were for.
If you hadn’t thrown in the qualifier “documented “ I’d say sex. But whatever…
But even then, you didn’t go to the phone company to get one. You went to a payphone and called the phone company business office and scheduled an appointment to have an installer come out and install a new phone (or remove your old phone). The current modular jack that you can simply plug and unplug a cord to/from began to be deployed in the Bell System starting in the 1970s. Before then, they had to send an installer with a screwdriver, wire strippers, and wires out to attach or detach a phone.
Before what is commonly called the “RJ11” jack came into use, there was a brief period when a 4-prong connector that looked like a wall wart was available, but it didn’t get much use in residential installations.
Our family bought a newly-built house in 1959, and it had 2 sockets for those large plugs in 2 spots, our recreation room and the basement. Only one of our phones had the plug. The idea was we could move the phone from the recreation room to the basement if someone was in the basement and wanted to answer the phone (remember, no answering machines in those days). That way we only paid for the one physical phone instead of two.
The Colosseum was a marvel of efficiency. The entire building could be filled or emptied of up to 80,000 people in 15 minutes. There were 76 entrances, and circular passages around the perimeter called ‘vomitoria’ which helped uh, vomit the spectators into their seats or out of the building.
It helped that the Colosseum was free to attend, so no need for ticket lines. People just flooded in, and vomited out.
I remember some pretty big lines for Star Wars back in the day. I just googled around and found lots of pictures of very long lines, along with the claim from one contemporary news story that people in that region waited in line for as long as 36 hours to see ‘The Empire Strikes Back’.
So multi-day lines for non-essentials were happening in the 1970’s at least.
I could imagine that already before Star Wars, people had been standing in lines for concert tickets for very popular bands for days. Sorry, no cite, just a hunch.
ETA: I dimly remember a scene from a documentary of David Bowies “Ziggy Stardust” tour with fans camping out in sleeping backs in front the ticket office. That must have been in 1972.