We’re all hearing the buzz about robots and AI eyeing our desks, but the phrase “10 jobs we” reminds us that technology has been stealing professions long before the digital age.
10 Jobs We Remember Losing
10 Gong Farmer
A few centuries ago, what we now call a bathroom was known as a privy—a raised board with a hole in the middle rather than a modern flush toilet. People would sit on it to relieve themselves, and their waste fell through the opening into a cesspit below.
When those cesspits filled up, they required emptying, and that was the domain of the gong farmer.
The term ‘gong’ meant ‘going,’ while ‘farmer’ referred to the act of ‘harvesting’ those goings. Gong farmers waded into cramped cesspits, often waist‑deep in filth. Some employed a smaller helper—a boy who scooped the muck into carts for transport to dumps where it was turned into fertilizer.
Because bathing was a rarity in the Middle Ages, gong farmers were notoriously stinky. Their odor was so overpowering that they were usually confined to their homes and permitted to work only after dark.
The occupation was hazardous as well; the decomposing waste released poisonous gases that could prove lethal inside the pits. Nevertheless, the relatively generous wages compensated for the humiliation and danger.
The role vanished once sewage pipes and treatment plants emerged in the 19th century, rendering manual cesspit emptying obsolete. A few gong farmers still survive in isolated regions today.
9 Knocker Upper
Long before the alarm clock became a household staple, people relied on a knocker‑upper to jolt them awake, a profession that persisted well into the 1970s.
Early knocker‑uppers would either knock or ring the doors of their paying clients. They soon discovered this annoyed neighbors and often woke non‑paying households, so they switched to tapping windows with long poles.
The tap was loud enough to rouse the client yet quiet enough not to disturb anyone else. After delivering three or four taps, the knocker‑upper would move on without staying to confirm the client was truly up.
The trade dwindled as electricity spread and alarm clocks became commonplace, with most practitioners closing shop in the 1940s and 1950s and the profession disappearing entirely by the 1970s.
8 Ice Cutter
Between 1800 and 1920, households preserved food by harvesting natural ice from frozen ponds, a job performed by ice cutters who wielded ice axes and later handheld saws. The industry grew so large that massive ice saws, pulled by horses, entered the scene.
Most of the ice originated from fresh‑water ponds in the north‑west United States during the coldest months of January and February. The work was grueling; cutters labored seven days a week, ten‑hour shifts, racing against the thaw to gather enough ice before March.
The horses used to tow the large saws faced the same perils—falling into icy waters and contaminating the ice with their dung. Many operations even employed a ‘shine boy’ whose job was to retrieve the horse waste and stash it in a waterproof wooden sled.
Harvested blocks were stored in icehouses—double‑walled structures raised off the ground and insulated with sand, straw, sawdust, hay, charcoal, bark, or any material that could slow melting. These warehouses were deliberately sited away from trees to keep the ice dry.
Because ice could melt or form imperfectly, the trade was unpredictable; few cutters enjoyed two profitable seasons in a row. Pond owners who sold their own ice often earned more than the cutters themselves. The industry faded after electric refrigerators rendered natural ice unnecessary.
7 Match Maker
Centuries ago, match‑making factories employed an all‑female workforce to produce matches, the workers commonly called ‘matchstick girls.’ Their labor was both arduous and hazardous, especially at firms like Bryant and May, which were notorious for low wages, strict rules, and the use of toxic white phosphorus.
These women endured fourteen‑hour workdays and were frequently fined for minor infractions such as dropping a match, chatting with coworkers, or arriving late. Their greatest danger, however, stemmed from exposure to white phosphorus.
White phosphorus is highly poisonous; prolonged contact caused a disease known as ‘phossy jaw,’ which rotted the jawbone and could spread to the brain, often leading to a slow, agonizing death. The only remedy was surgical removal of the damaged jaw, a procedure that sometimes proved fatal.
6 Rectal Teaching Assistant
While debates rage about robots and AI stealing our future jobs, a quieter revolution already snatched the role of the rectal teaching assistant.
Medical trainees traditionally learned prostate examinations by feeling the gland through a live human rectum, a position held by a single licensed assistant in the United Kingdom.
Facing a shortage of such assistants, researchers at Imperial College London engineered a robotic rectum that mimics human anatomy, effectively eliminating the need for the lone practitioner.
The robotic system offers internal cameras that stream live footage to clinicians, providing visual feedback impossible with a human donor, and is hailed as a superior training tool.
5 Human Computers
The first human computers were hired in 1939 at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with Barbara Canright leading the way. She performed calculations ranging from the thrust needed for aircraft lift to the propellant quantities required for rockets.
These intricate computations were carried out with pencil and paper; determining a rocket’s travel time could consume an entire day, while some problems demanded a week of work, filling up to eight notebooks per calculation.
During the post‑war era, human computers became pivotal to the space race, calculating trajectories for the United States’ first satellite, Voyager probes, the inaugural unmanned Mars rover, and ultimately the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Although humans were initially trusted over machines, NASA’s experiments with mechanical computers in the 1950s gradually displaced the human calculators, rendering the profession obsolete.
4 Pin Boy
In earlier decades, bowling alleys hired young boys—known as pinsetters, pin spotters, or pin boys—to manually reset fallen pins and return balls to players, a low‑pay, often part‑time job that could stretch late into the night.
The landscape shifted when Gottfried Schmidt invented a semi‑automatic pinsetter in 1936, which still required human assistance. Eventually, fully automatic pinsetters emerged, making the pin boy’s role redundant.
3 Lamplighter
Public street lighting first appeared in the 18th century, using fish‑oil lamps that required a lamplighter to ignite them each evening and extinguish them at dawn. Later, gas lamps replaced fish oil, but they still depended on lamplighters.
These workers wielded long poles to light the lamps at night and to douse the flames in the morning, while also handling cleaning, maintenance, and repairs.
The profession began to decline in the 1870s with the advent of electric streetlamps, which made gas lamps obsolete in the United States. Britain clung to gas lighting longer, as electric lamps sparked controversy.
Critics complained that the gas lights were blinding, unaesthetic, and overly bright, while electricity was expensive. The British Commercial Gas Association even promoted gas lamps and hindered electric adoption. By the 1930s electric lighting dominated, though about 1,500 historic gas lamps still grace London’s streets.
2 Log Driver
Before trains and trucks, timber felled deep in forests was bundled and floated down rivers, a process that often resulted in massive logjams stretching for miles and sometimes required dynamite to break apart.
Men known as log drivers escorted the drifting timber, navigating specialized boats and even hopping from log to log. The job was perilous; many drivers drowned or were crushed between the tumbling logs.
1 Leech Collector
In the 1800s, a short‑lived profession emerged to supply leeches for bloodletting, a medical practice thought to cure ailments by draining a patient’s blood.
Leech collectors, often impoverished women, harvested the creatures from ponds and other watery locales, using their own legs—or the legs of old horses—as bait to lure the leeches.
These women let the leeches feed on their blood for roughly twenty minutes before detaching them, as a full leech was easier to remove than a hungry one. The bites often caused prolonged bleeding and injuries, which in turn attracted more leeches, boosting business.
The trade faded as leeches became scarce and physicians grew skeptical of bloodletting’s efficacy. Medical advances eventually disproved the practice, leaving the leech collectors without a market, while the leeches themselves escaped extinction.