Obsolete Jobs Trivia Quiz

Answer: straight razor

With a warm moist towel to soften the skin first, a carefully stropped blade, a steady hand, and an astringent aftershave afterwards, a straight razor shave can be a relaxing experience. Men who lived in town and didn't like shaving themselves might go over to the barber's shop a few times a week, and the close straight razor shave would keep them looking good. I had a friend do it to me and really enjoyed the relaxing aspect, but fewer commercial barber shops offer it, due in part to fear of spreading blood-borne diseases, and also due to the fact that disposable blades make shaving oneself easier, so men don't need to pay for shaves anymore - and of course there are now electric shavers. One imagines men with long beards in the old days, but in typical US/British fashion, clean-shaven faces were the norm for decades or centuries up to the 1860s, then beards returned from the turn of the 20th century to the hippy era.

Answer: rail splitter

Many young country men earned spending money, or just helped their fathers, by splitting trees into rails. In the early 19th century, wood was cheap, and trees could be split with wedges and a maul (sledgehammer) into triangular rails 4"-6" on a side and 10-16 feet long. Stacked carefully into an interlocking fence, they cost almost nothing but labor, yet kept animals out of precious crops. Sawn boards, then barbed wire took over, but splitting rails was once a job on most any farm.

Answer: delivered a block of ice

Wooden cabinets with a space to hold a block of ice were called refrigerators, long before electricity, and as far back as the early 19th century. Mary Randolph wrote in the 1838 "Virginia Housewife," concerning fresh beef in summer: "If you have an ice-house or refrigerator, it will be best to keep it there." But without that ice, nothing happened. With the ice in place, the whole refrigerator or "ice box" stayed cool, as the ice slowly melted, draining into a pan that needed emptying regularly.

There was an ice trade all along the East Coast and inland, supplying the ice stored from the previous winter. Henry David Thoreau wrote about ice being cut off Walden Pond in the 1840s. The ice man, who pulled a block of ice out of the back of a wagon, and carried it into the house with tongs, was the final step in the process.

Answer: making hoops for skirts

If a woman wore a hoop skirt, she wasn't weighed down by multiple petticoats, yet still could have the stylish bell-shaped skirts that everyone wanted. The undergarment was made of horizontal spring-steel wire hoops, held apart every few inches by cloth tape that hung from a wasteband. Hoop skirts came into fashion in the late 1850s, increased in circumference, then became smaller and finally faded away a few decades later.

Despite the embarrassment of mentioning underwear, endless semi-naughty cartoons and photos made fun of women's strange new fashion obsession.

Answer: elevator operator (lift attendant)

Imagine entering a tiny sealed room, with strangers, in a strange hotel or department store, and being expected to operate the hotel's equipment yourself! Shocking! So hotels and other buildings had an elevator attendant to run the machinery, especially back when elevators didn't have buttons and required working a lever or other controls.

The "Minneapolis Star Tribune" wrote an article in 2014 about the last two elevator operators in the state, one of whom was 80 years old. So there may be a few still left, but it's not a growing job.

Answer: driving mules or ponies in coalmines

Coal needed hauling somehow, and in the days before electric machinery, mules (or oxen or ponies) were typically hitched to the cars full of coal that ran on underground tracks. The animals were stabled underground, never seeing the light as they worked or rested.

There were reports of them going almost mad with joy, or perhaps fear, on first seeing the sunlit world when brought up for retirement, but they soon adapted to the strange bright world after a life of hard work in darkness.

Answer: laundress

But there are commercial laundries and dry cleaners today, you say. How is this an obsolete job? A woman in the 1890 "Locomotive Engineers' Journal" described how her laundress polished her husband's detached shirt bosoms, cuffs and collars with the application of starch, kerosene and wax, followed by careful hand work with a polishing iron. Imagine walking into a commercial laundry today and saying, "I'd like a dozen bosoms and collars polished, please." It would seem pointless, even if you explained it. Who cares today if your shirt front was so white and slick that it almost shone? Yet I've seen a shirt still preserved that way in a museum, and even after 150 years, it was blindingly white. Apparently it was a status symbol, that only an experienced laundress with the right iron and ingredients could produce.

Answer: milkman

People liked milk delivered fresh, so they had a standing order with a milkman, who could also supply cream and sometimes eggs, butter, cheese or cottage cheese too. The practice continued until homemakers all lived close enough to a supermarket where milk became cheaper to buy, and dairies found it better to consolidate milk sales and pick-up with processing plants. Reliable electricity or ice delivery was necessary before homemakers could give up milk delivery also, but by the end of the 20th century, milkmen were pretty much gone, except for a few lingering jokes about them.

Answer: plantation overseer

An overseer was, typically, a white man who worked for an annual contract in the U.S. South, managing an owner's slaves and plantation, making a profit or losing his annual contract next year to someone who could. Overseers were sometimes black, though most were white. One could argue that the job still exists, because all large farms, too big for the owner to manage alone, North or South, before or after the 13th Amendment ended slavery in the USA, need an overseer of the employees.

But "plantation overseer" has gained a specific meaning from the antebellum South, and no longer fits the general work of a modern farm supervisor.

Answer: well digger

Except in rare third-world circumstances, water wells are drilled today, not dug. Everyone stays safely on the surface. Earlier, at least in the 19th century, well diggers dug a hole three or four feet across. A pulley on a tripod over the hole lowered the worker to the bottom, raised the buckets of dirt he filled, raised him up for lunch or a break, and then raised him up at the end of the day.

The next day he was lowered down and his work began again, every day for 10 or 12 hours till--he hoped--water began to seep in.

It was considered a physically demanding, dangerous job. Besides the obvious danger of side-wall collapse, there was the danger of death from poisonous underground gasses, plus unexpected accidents like a rope breaking a hundred feet from the bottom.