10 Historical Jobs We're Glad Aren't Around Anymore

OAKUM PICKER

Oakum, a clump of tarry fibers that was good at forming watertight seals, was vital to the construction of big wooden ships, and by extension a reliable stockpile of oakum was necessary if England and other maritime nations were to continue existing.

Unfortunately, the best way to produce oakum was to pick apart and unravel worn-out tar-covered ropes, a process considered unbelievably tedious even in a society that considered reading the Bible a fun leisure activity. The solution: make oakum picking the primary means of punishment for the British prison and workhouse system.

Women and children typically picked a pound or so of oakum per day; grown men had to produce two pounds of the nasty fluffy substance unless they really pissed someone off, at which point they could be ordered to up the ante to six pounds a day.

WHIPPING BOY

In some ways, princes are just like any other child-they misbehave, they throw tantrums, and they need a firm hand to keep them in line. In one important way, however, princes are very different-in keeping with the principles of the divine right of kings, they are hand-picked by God and therefore can not possibly be disciplined by anyone except another royal, and as the king was often out re-conquering the Holy Land or something this meant that tutors and nannies had no direct way to punish a bratty prince.

Enter the whipping boy, a child (typically from a rich or semi-noble family) who was assigned to be the prince's official friend from birth who could be punished in the prince's stead. Whipping boys were encouraged to form a close emotional bond with their prince, a bond that was reinforced by the closed-off nature of the royal court, and apparently the friendship between the two children could be genuine enough that the threat of a punishment delivered to the whipping boy could actually curb princely brattishness.

Charles I was so close to his whipping boy that he ennobled him as the Earl of Dysart. Still and all, at the end of the day the essential duty of the whipping boy was to get his ass beat for absolutely no fault of his own, so the vague and hazy promises of earldom weren't usually much of a plus for these unlucky kids.

SHIP'S BOY

Good rule of thumb: if an occupation involves being the "boy" of anything, you probably want to steer clear. Of course, in most cases ship's boys didn't have much of a choice in the matter, being sent out to sea at ages as young as ten years old to learn the ropes of the one of the most dangerous (but potentially lucrative) trades in the world. T

he term ship's boy typically referred to the midshipmen (uniformed officers in training) and any young enlisted men, and while they were allowed a certain degree of leeway compared to the rest of the men on the ship, they still faced the dangers common to anyone at sea, including drowning, starving, disease, fire, murder, combat, rape, icebergs, whales, slavers, food poisoning, training accidents, falling from the rigging, being crushed by loose cannons or cargo, being eaten by strange animals, being eaten by strange people, being found guilty of mutiny/piracy/buggery and executed, and drinking so much rum their hearts stopped, just to name a few.

On the other hand, the survivors of a boyhood spent at sea were typically phenomenal sailors and could rise to amazing heights; no less than the legendary Royal Navy hero Lord Horatio Nelson began his career at the age of thirteen aboard a ship commanded by his uncle.

URINE SPECIALISTS

For a long time, pee was not just a substance used to fill Gatorade bottles intended to be thrown at the police, but an important industrial resource vital for the production of many textiles and chemicals. Phosphorous, ammonia, and saltpeter (the latter being an important component of gunpowder) were derived from urine until more advanced and less disgusting methods were developed to extract these substances.

Tanning leather required vast quantities of piss and often drew on contributions from public "piss pots" placed on public street corners. Fulling (a cleansing process necessary for producing woolen cloth) involved stomping wool drenched in whiz and was considered such an important economic activity in ancient Rome that urine was a taxed trade good.

Of course, being economically important didn't make pee any less gross, so urine-intensive industries (especially tanneries, which also incorporated a good deal of human and animal dung) where traditionally confined to the far edges of any human settlement.

CHIMNEY SWEEP

Among the many lies perpetuated by the book and film "Mary Poppins" (e.g. nannies are a valid substitute for parental affection, turn-of-the-century English medicine was good for you and not just a haphazard mixture of opium and grain alcohol, British people can fly, etc.) is the idea that chimney sweeps were cheerful, athletic, dance-happy young men who all looked like Dick van Dyke.

In truth, the typical chimney sweep was a filthy, terrified, naked boy (many sweeps stripped down to lessen the chance of getting stuck) as young as six years old, usually purchased from a poor house and ordered to crawl into narrow chimneys under threat of violence, who was under no circumstances likely to break into a joyful musical routine.

Sweeping was based on an apprenticeship system for the simple reason that after puberty, most sweeps just couldn't fit down the chimney anymore, and was one of the first jobs to have its own industrially-related forms of cancer-a carcinoma known as "soot wart" that left ones scrotum a swollen, hardened, painful mass before spreading up into the abdomen to finish the job.

If (generally "when") a sweep got stuck, common ways to encourage him to un-stick himself including sticking pins in his feet and lighting a fire underneath him as it was generally much too expensive to break open the chimney and rescue him. Chim-chim-cheree!

LEECH COLLECTOR

Since one of the most popular medical treatments for much of the middle ages was to drain a more-or-less random amount of blood from the patient, leeches were an essential part of any medical toolkit.

The tricky part was acquiring leeches, a cold and icky process wherein leech collectors would trudge bare-legged through filthy bogs and swamps until a suitable number of blood-sucking invertebrates had attached themselves to their legs.

Then the leech collector would wade back to shore and try not to pass out, as the leeches had to drink their fill and fall off naturally to be of any use to doctors-if you cheated and tried to yank them off they would leave their mouth-parts embedded in your flesh.

William Wordsworth once wrote a poem about the life and hardships of leech collectors that many saw as a metaphor for the life and hardships of the common poet, although if you were to tell an actual leech collector about the suffering of poor little William Wordsworth (who at no point was obliged to have blood-drinking slugs attached to his body) they would probably laugh in your face before passing out.

COAL HURRIER

Coal mining may still be dangerous and unpleasant, but after years of reforms and regulations we've at least managed to get all the preschoolers out of the business. When the Industrial Revolution made coal big business, clever mine owners realized that children as young as three or four years old were small enough to push coal carts down low, narrow tunnels, yet dumb enough not to realize that they should be getting paid much much more to do so.

Kids were often apprenticed/purchased from workhouses and used in teams to drive mine carts for as long as twelve hours a day. After an act of Parliament made school attendance mandatory in 1870, the coal-hurrying workforce was deprived of tiny, gullible children, although dropouts and habitual truants would continue moving coal well into the 1920s.

GONG FARMER

Involving neither gongs nor farming, the job of the gong farmer was a simple and disgusting one: travel around Tudor cities and estates at night, dig all the crap out of the outhouses and cess-pits, and transport the waste to the nearest sewer, creek, ditch, or unpopular river.

Gong farmers often sold their produce to tanners, one of the few occupations that smelled worse than they did, and were responsible for a boom in smoking tobacco as a way of covering up their permanent stench.

Gong farming actually paid quite well compared to the many other horrible things you could do for money at the time, but this had to be balanced against the very real danger of asphyxiating in a pit of human feces.