My job requires me to sit at a desk and stare at a computer screen for most of the working day. That’s bad for my back and my eyesight, but it’s not going to kill me. The odd time I’m asked to attend a site meeting, which involves donning a high-viz jacket and a hard hat, standing around with a bunch of people to talk about renovation work to be carried out in some supermarket in the country, somewhere. The rules are strict – no jacket and helmet, and you’re barred from the meeting. Doesn’t matter if there isn’t actually any building work going on at the time. Safety first!
We live in a time of health and safety, mindfulness, welfare at work, GDPR, workplace relations, and what not. It really is quite difficult to do anything dangerous nowadays. Not so back in the good old days! Everybody knows the famous picture of a bunch of lads casually having their lunch, sitting on a steel beam suspended at a dizzying height, with the New York streetscape far below them. Not a hard hat in sight. Although the “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” was a staged photo1, it does bring back memories of a time when jobs that are now ruled by health and safety regulations were once a matter of life and death.
Take typesetting for example. That used to be a job in the print business, before PCs and desktop publishing moved the craft to a computer screen. A family friend had been a typesetter, back in the sixties. He was a balding man with prominent scars on his forehead and one on his cheek – the result of molten lead splashing from the Linotype2 machine as he was working the keyboard, and a line of type (you wonder where they got the name from) was recycled back into the machine with a bit too much vigour. He was lucky not to have suffered from lead poisoning, which was another risk of the trade.
Taxidermy may be a bit of a macabre job, but otherwise harmless enough. After all, the animals being stuffed are dead. In the good old days however – until the 1960s in fact – the skins were preserved with arsenic soap3, and handling these could result in taxidermists suffering with open sores or going blind. There was still a sting in the tail even after the animal’s demise, as it turns out. To this day, stuffed animals in museums have to be handled with care because of the poison.
What about working in a wine cellar, looking after countless bottles of champagne slowly maturing under layers of dust? It would appear the only danger is that of getting drunk too often. But no! Champagne riddlers are people whose job it is to constantly go around turning the bottles to move the sediment – and back in the early 19th century they ran the real risk of bottles exploding unexpectedly. So much so, that they wore iron masks as protection. Apparently it was not uncommon for exploding bottles to trigger a chain reaction that resulted in the loss of up to 90% of the stock4 – and the health of the unfortunate riddler.
Surely watch making is a job that is devoid of any physical danger. The tools of the trade are so tiny, you couldn’t hurt a mouse with them. Dials are painted with tiny brushes, the tip moistened between the lips to make a nice sharp point for extra accuracy. The only problem, back in the 20s, was that the American factory girls were told to use radium paint for those fancy new glow-in-the-dark watches. Not only did these women become sick with radiation poisoning, more than 50 had died by 19275.
Certain jobs will always carry risk, of course. Chasing armed criminals, reporting news from warzones, or playing rugby, are some of the things you can do to guarantee trouble ahead. Or flying to the moon in a rocket. I reckon the reason they stopped doing that is not because the money ran out, but because NASA introduced normal health and safety standards. We’re just not allowed to have fun anymore.
- https://www.rockefellercenter.com/magazine/arts-culture/lunch-atop-skyscraper-irish-immigrants/ ↩︎
- https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2022/06/the-linotype-the-machine-that-revolutionized-movable-type/ ↩︎
- https://wdm.ca/2020/07/27/the-dangers-of-old-taxidermy/ ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_champagne#Development_of_the_modern_Champagne_industry ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls ↩︎