As you may know, time changes all the time, things disappear, resurrect, or die out. If you had told me when I was a child that VHS, Cassettes or Discman would disappear in a few years I would laugh and thought you were crazy. But the reality is a fact and the old video store I hang outside in my youth has been replaced with a pizza baker. The same is true with professions and now I will tell you about some professions that existed before, as you may not even have heard of today :)
1. Dog Whippers
Between 1500 and 1800, it was quite common to let the dogs run freely around the streets. And at this time, dogs that ran into the church to harass parishioners, steal the communion bread and hump the priest's leg was quite a big problem.
The problem was so big that the church staff had their own dog whippers, who had the task of whip the dogs out of the church area. So every time one of Satan's friends (the dog) came in and tried to disturb the worship service, it did not take long before one of these guys hit the whip and got the dogs from the premises.
2. The Human radar
It was the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted who discovered electromagnetism, which would later be used for radar technology. It was in 1820, and it would take nearly 100 years before you could use it effectively to find out how far away an object was.
World War I was the first war where the forces used aviation attacks, and radar technology was not as advanced as it is today. So how could you alert the countryside about a possible enemy bombing? Well by using a human radar.
Professional listeners (with extremely good hearing) were provided with "dumbo" ears to sit and listen for what could be hostile aircraft on the horizon. The theory was that the sound from the airplane engines would bounce from the "sound mirrors" and into the ear. The technology turned out to be working, as more countries around the world used similar technology, until they managed to develop a slightly better and advanced technology that could work for them.
3. Professional newspaper readers
Before the industrial revolution and machines like Spinning Jenny came in to play, just about everything was made with hands. This was also the case for the for cigar rollers in the United States in the early 1900s.
It was also when the profession as a lecturer arose; To entertain the works before TV and radio were available. The lecturer was simply the one who was at the forefront of the room and read out loud from the newspaper or a book.
lecturers appeared up by several cigar factories in the United States. The lecturers were not paid for the work by the factory owners, but it was the employees who appreciated the entertainment that they all paid a small part of their salary. With so many factory workers who paid a small sum each, the lectors ended up with a better paid job than the workers themselves. At that time, the salary for reading the newspaper was around $75 a week, while the workers earned roughly around $20 in the same time.
Unfortunately, this job disappeared shortly after the radio became available to the public, which makes one wonder if the video killed the radio star, did the radio kill the news reader?
4. Log Drivers
From the beginning of to the mid-1800s, the timber industry was even more male dominated than it is today. At that time there were neither trailers nor trains that could carry the timber from the forest to the sawmill. Horses and bulls had been invented a while before this, but the poor animals would have been completely exhausted if they had to pull the timber throughout the country, so the rivers were frequently used to transport the timber.
However, since the timber does not have intelligence, and according to Murphy's law it will change direction completely opposite of what you want, they had their own men who would stand on the timber and make sure that it held its course.
The job simply meant balancing on a log by means of a stick, making sure that the timber followed the flow down the river and up to the place where the horses would take over the job to the sawmill.
5. Human alarm clock
Many people struggle to get up in the morning, and for many our worst enemy is the alarm clock. But, how did you get up before the alarm clock was invented?
Using the neighborhood's most annoying person, "The knocker-up". Even with the name, this person dident have so much to do with unexplained pregnancies among the housewives in the neighborhood (this was the milking man's job), but because his / her's task was to walk around the neighborhood at dawn, equipped with a up to four meters stick , Which was used to knock people's windows and doors.