Several trades and professions around today are much different than when they first appeared. In fact, many have changed so much that their origins would be hard to imagine. Who would believe that the world’s first airline did not have airplanes? That the first gas station was a pharmacy? Or that funeral homes operated the first ambulances?

Many trades and professions often have weird origins because they began as offshoots of other businesses. Others only got defined and structured long after they first appeared. At other times, advances in technology just introduced some new ways of doing things.

10 Funeral Homes Operated The First Ambulance Services

Funeral homes launched the first ambulance services when they helped to evacuate the wounded to hospitals during the US Civil War. The early ambulances only had a stretcher, a blanket, and a bottle of whiskey as anesthesia. Later alterations included oxygen. The personnel on board also learned some lifesaving medical procedures, making them the first paramedics.

The ambulances were actually hearses—the same ones used by funeral homes to transport dead people to cemeteries. The hearses worked because regular horse-drawn carriages were not long enough to allow the patients to lie down.

However, the funeral homes were not really interested in saving lives or even in the money they charged their clients. Over half of their clients never even bothered to pay. The real profit was in the death of the client because the funeral home that provided the ambulance was the likeliest to receive an offer to arrange the burial.

Funeral homes stopped providing ambulance services after Congress passed the Highway Safety Act in 1966. The act set regulations over what sort of vehicles could be used as ambulances. It also required ambulances to be staffed by trained personnel. The funeral homes could not meet the regulations and left the business for hospitals and other operators.^[1]

9 The First Gas Station Was A Pharmacy

In early August 1888, Bertha Benz (the wife of Karl Benz, who invented the first practical automobile) completed the first road trip in a motorcar when she and her two sons traveled from Mannheim to visit her mother in Pforzheim, Germany. The car was the Patent-Motorwagen No. 3, which was built by her husband.

At the time, Karl Benz had problems marketing the vehicle. When Bertha suggested that they make a road trip to publicize the car, he refused. Undeterred, Bertha and her two sons went without her husband’s permission. Karl only realized what had happened when he saw her letter informing him that she had left for her mum’s.

The vehicle broke down several times, but Bertha handled the repairs. However, her greatest challenge arose when she ran out of fuel. She walked to a local pharmacy where she purchased Ligroin, a petroleum solvent that was used as fuel at the time. The pharmacy had the stuff because it was used for cleaning surfaces.

That pharmacy in the town of Wiesloch is considered the first filling station in the world. In keeping with the tradition, other pharmacies stocked up on Ligroin and then gasoline and sold these products to car owners until the first gas stations appeared. For Bertha, her trip made the news and popularized her husband’s car as a reliable means of transportation.^[2]

8 The First Motels Were Unbelievably Luxurious

Motels are often less expensive than budget hotels even though motels were never intended to be cheap. In fact, the first motels were actually hotels with parking garages for car owners. That’s why they were called “motels” (motor hotels).

Arthur Heineman built the first one in 1925. Vehicles were becoming mainstream in the US at the time, and Heineman had observed that conventional hotels did not have enough parking spaces for traveling drivers. So he built the first motel at San Luis Obispo, which is between Los Angeles and San Francisco. He called it the Milestone Mo-Tel Inn.

It consisted of several bungalows with garages that could accommodate up to 160 people in total. Lodgers paid $1.25 to sleep in one of the rooms for a night. Car owners parked their vehicles in the garages while they slept in nearby rooms. The motel also had separate rooms for chauffeurs in case the car owner had one.

Heineman spent $80,000 to build his motel. It had central heating, showers, a bell tower, and other expensive features that are alien to today’s motels. He planned to build a chain of 18 motels in California alone. However, the Great Depression soon came along, forcing him to slow down on his plans.

By the time it was over, several competitors had sprung up to steal a share of the market. They engaged in price wars that quickly turned motels into budget lodges without luxurious facilities.^[3]

7 The World’s First Airline Used A Fleet Of Airships

Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktiengesellschaft (“German Airship Transportation Corporation Ltd.”), aka DELAG, was the world’s first airline. It was founded on November 16, 1909, as a subsidiary of the Zeppelin Company, the German airship maker. Little wonder that it had a fleet of airships in place of airplanes.

However, DELAG did not provide scheduled flights until 1919 when it started to operate flights between Berlin and southern Germany. Until then, it operated tour flights for sightseers who wanted to view the Earth from high above.

The Zeppelin Company founded DELAG to create an alternate stream of income. Before then, the Zeppelin Company had focused on selling its airships to the German military. However, it was unsure whether the military would buy enough airships to keep it afloat. DELAG remained in business until 1935.^[4]

6 The World’s First Commercial Airline Used Airboats That Flew 1.5 Meters (5 Ft) Above The Water

We already mentioned that DELAG—the world’s first airline—did not offer scheduled commercial flights until 1919. This is why The St. Petersburg–Tampa Airboat Line, which was founded in 1913, is considered the world’s first commercial airline to offer scheduled flights.

The airline offered regular flights from St. Petersburg to Tampa, Florida, using a two-seat airboat called the Lark of Duluth. An airboat is an airplane that lands and takes off from water. The Lark of Duluth had just two seats. The pilot sat in one while one or two passengers were cramped in the other. The airplane itself skirted just 1.5 meters (5 ft) above the water.

The St. Petersburg–Tampa Airboat Line made its first flight on January 1, 1914, and the passenger was Abram C. Pheil, the former mayor of St. Petersburg. Pheil got the seat after winning a $400 auction. Later passengers paid $5 for a single trip.

The St. Petersburg–Tampa Airboat Line was a success because it made the 29-kilometer (18 mi) flight in just 23 minutes. At the time, steamships covered that distance in two hours, trains in 4–12 hours, and cars in 20 hours. However, the airboat line could not remain in business and shut down in 1914.^[5]

5 Barbershops Doubled As Operating Rooms

Barbers doubled as surgeons until a few centuries ago. Both professions were so closely linked that they had a single association called the Company of Barber-Surgeons from the 16th to the 18th centuries. The barbers often treated medical ailments like syphilis, which physicians of the day wanted nothing to do with. Barbers also helped to remove painful teeth, which technically made them dentists.

Many barbers performed bloodletting, the now-obsolete and disproved act of draining blood from a person to expel diseases from the body. Some say that this is why barbers often have red-and-white poles outside their shops. The red represents the blood while the white is the bandage. However, this theory is disputed.

Nevertheless, we know that barbers often advertised their bloodletting services by leaving bowls of blood in their windows. Several surgeons were not comfortable with the barbers and desperately wanted to separate their trade from the barbers. The surgeons got their way in 1745 when the Company of Barber-Surgeons was split.^[6]

4 The First Newspapers Were Books

Newspapers have existed as pamphlets, corantos, and newsbooks for centuries. However, the direct predecessors of modern newspapers are newsbooks. Made of several news pamphlets bound together to create a small book, they were published like regular books and even had title pages.

Unlike modern newspapers that report a variety of news stories, the newsbooks and pamphlets often only reported single events like battles, disasters, and celebrations. However, what we consider the first newspaper was published by Johann Carolus and sold in the city of Strasbourg, Germany, in September 1605.

Carolus called his newspaper Relation aller Furnemmen und gedenckwurdigen Historien. Like its predecessors, it was also a newsbook. However, it reported a variety of news. Carolus’s weekly newspaper was 4–6 pages long.^[7]

3 The First Movie Was Only 2.11 Seconds Long

We expect our movies to run for around two hours these days. Interestingly, the first movie ran for only 2.11 seconds. Yes! That was no mistake. 2.11 seconds. The movie was titled Roundhay Garden Scene and was produced by French inventor Louis Le Prince in 1888.

Roundhay Garden Scene was a video of Louis’s son Adolphe and several friends and relatives walking around a garden. Louis Le Prince created the film while testing a new video camera he had invented.

To be clear, an earlier film titled The Horse In Motion was created in 1878—a full 10 years before Louis Le Prince made his movie. However, The Horse In Motion is not considered a real film because it was produced with several photo cameras timed to shoot as a horse galloped past. The photographs were later blended into a single video.^[8]

2 The First Psychiatric Hospitals Were Private Businesses

Early psychiatric hospitals were called lunatic asylums. They were private for-profit businesses run by cruel entrepreneurs who were more interested in profits than the health of their patients. The patients were treated with disdain and kept in terrible conditions that rivaled prisons.

Before the first lunatic asylums appeared, mad people were often kept in homes where their conditions were managed by their relatives. However, this was no easy task. Many families experienced some relief when the first private for-profit lunatic asylums sprang up in the 1600s.

The operators of these asylums used crude methods on their patients. They held them down with irons and applied the same brutal methods used on stubborn horses to keep their patients under control. Several churches operated more decent, nonprofit lunatic asylums. But they could not take enough patients. So most families just sent their mentally deranged relatives to these for-profit lunatic asylums.

These facilities went into decline when more decent lunatic asylums started to appear in the 1790s. The for-profits finally went out of business when the government started to build lunatic asylums in the 1800s. These places were later renamed psychiatric hospitals.^[9]

1 Priests And Medicine Men Were The First Barbers

Barbering dates to over 6,000 years ago when priests and medicine men started the side job of cutting hair. At the time, people believed that spirits could enter the body through the head. So getting a haircut was considered a religious rite.

People often let their hair grow long enough to allow the good spirits in. Then they held elaborate religious ceremonies where the hair was cut to lock the good spirits in and keep the bad ones out. The superstition seemed to have died off during the ancient Egyptian Empire when people regularly shaved their heads to keep clean because they sweated a lot.^[10]

In popular culture of the past there are many jobs that were so ubiquitous they have become an ingrained part of the public mind. Unfortunately, many of these once iconic professions are now gone or are reaching a point of near extinction. Below we list ten iconic careers that are now going the way of the dodo. While some of us may not have been alive when these jobs were commonplace, due to our vicariously experiencing them through old movies and TV shows, it still feels like we missed out. Join us as we wax nostalgic for the good old days.

Meter readers were once a very common part of everyday life, no one thought much if a man came around the back of our house in the middle of a day—it wasn’t a burglar, just the meter reader. The meter readers often talked to their customers, knew them personally and could report if something seemed wrong, especially with an elderly person. However, companies are now switching to digital devices that send signals without the need for someone to come and check them, leading to the end of an iconic job and the loss of jobs for many who once enjoyed the profession. While the companies claim they will try to train people for other jobs now that the meter reader job is gone, it is likely many will simply lose employment.

Travel agents have been a part of our culture for a long time. They are skilled at getting us the best deal on our vacation and navigating all of the complexities for us. However, with the advent of the internet the need for travel agents is dwindling greatly. In the past five years travel agent jobs have already dropped by 14%—a trend that is likely to continue. Now that people can book their flights, rental cars and hotel rooms online, while seeing all of the options and deals side by side, travel agents aren’t really needed anymore. According to one expert, if you have used an online site to take care of your travel needs, you have contributed to destroying the jobs of travel agents everywhere. In our new internet based society, it seems that middlemen everywhere are being cut out of the deal, and jobs are being lost in the process.

In times past wherever we went to get gas, there would be a gas jockey waiting to pump our gas for us, wash our windows, check our oil and make sure our car was in tip top shape for our continuing journey. However, the existence of full service gas stations has dwindled greatly. Except for two US states, Oregon and New Jersey—where customers are not allowed to pump their own gas—full service gas stations basically don’t exist. While there are occasional gas stations that do it for the nostalgia and customer connection, it is increasingly rare to see this. Many feel that this is not good because many of the services the gas jockeys would offer, such as checking under the hood, are not performed by consumers on their own initiative. This makes the road more dangerous, and leads to consumers’ cars not being in nearly as good a shape as they should be.

In days past the job of an elevator operator was not only ubiquitous but it was also absolutely vital. Before the high tech elevators we have today, they had to be operated manually. The operator had to use levers and such to make sure that it was level with the floor, and advise people to watch their step. Some likened controlling the earliest elevators to learning how to drive a car. However, as time has gone by elevators no longer need to be operated by hand—they simply need buttons to be pressed. Some places still keep elevator operators around as a homage to the old days, but they spend most of their time doing clerical work and performing customer service.

Back in the early days of bowling, before automatic machines had been invented to replace the pins, kids would stand in the alley behind and wait to set the pins back up. One former pinboy recalled that he was paid about eight dollars a night, and would get broken ribs, smashed fingers and all sorts of bruises. Apparently some would throw the ball at incredible speeds, and the kids trying to fix the pins would be trying to watch for ten projectiles headed in their direction. According to one story, the automatic machines were invented after one man became fed up when a pinboy walked out on him in the middle of a game. He was so frustrated that he decided to invent an automatic machine for resetting pins to ensure such a problem would never occur again.

It is hard to say if the postal service will completely fall apart, but things don’t look good for the United States postal workers. Saturday mail delivery is being canceled, although parcel delivery still exists and three thousand and seven hundred locations are being closed, with over a hundred thousand workers losing their jobs. The culprit behind this is, once again, the internet. One of the mainstays of the Postal Service has not been parcel delivery but mail delivery, and with people increasingly using email or other more instantaneous methods of communication to convey messages, mail delivery is quickly becoming a thing of the past. And for those who sort mail, their jobs are being taken over by machines. In ten years, there may no longer be a mailman for the dog to chase.

When one thinks of the theater they always think of film reels being put in a huge contraption and then attended diligently by a skilled movie projectionist. However, unfortunately the man who sits in the projection booth and operates the projector may soon be out of a job. Again we have digital technology to thank for this. As progress marches onward, uninhibited by nostalgia for the past, movies are being put on hard drives and everything is becoming digital. Eventually all movies will be digital and film projectors as we know them will be a thing of the past.

This one is included not so much because the job is disappearing, but because there are so many misconceptions about this in popular culture that I felt it warranted inclusion. The truth is that the profession of dog catcher sort of once existed, but those who performed the function were referred to as “dog whippers”. The main function of those tasked back in the 16th through 19th centuries was actually to keep dogs out of the churches and more generally to deal with stray animals and keep them locked up. As time has gone by, the positions have evolved to control all animals, and also protect animals from those who would hurt them. However, an important misconception to note is the old saying “he couldn’t be elected dog catcher”. The truth is that there is no evidence that a dog catcher has ever been an elected position; it has pretty much always been a job that has been appointed by an executive.

Back in the day, and especially in old movies, telephone operators were not only everywhere, they were absolutely integral. If you wanted to get connected to anyone you needed a telephone operator. Now, however, they have almost completely disappeared. At first they were just relegated to long distance calls, then a few other odd situations, and now you really just don’t speak to telephone operators at all. In the past few years, some of the last remaining centers housing telephone operators have been closed down, the job is simply no longer necessary. Many who once dealt with operators on a daily basis have trouble imagining a world completely without them, but with current technology the position is defunct.

In the old days—again popularized by many TV shows—the milkman was often a friend of the family and a familiar presence. His position was vital. Due to the advent of refrigerators, and new methods that preserve milk for longer, the profession has dwindled to the point that it hardly exists anymore. Many consumers were worried about theft, because in many cases the milk would wait outside the door, where anyone could take it. While the profession had dwindled, it has still not completely disappeared. Around five percent in the United States still have their milk delivered to their home and there have even been new companies created for the purpose of providing this service. Perhaps milkmen will have a renaissance.

You can follow Gregory Myers on twitter where he dreads the day that robots will make writers obsolete.

Most of the modern professions are distinguished by a progressive focus and increased comfort of the work process. However, some specialists work in terrible conditions that can cause irreparable harm not only to the nervous system but also to life in general. This article presents a selection of the world’s worst professions.

10. Hospital Laundry Worker

Hospital laundry staff work in cramped and stuffy rooms filled with dirty laundry. During the work process, these people can contract severe infections. Also, such specialists are exposed to numerous occupational hazards: Chemical exposure, physical injury, accidents.

9. Portable Toilet Cleaner

The work of toilet cleaners is not pleasant: with the help of a vacuum device, these specialists wash the tanks under the toilet bowls and collect the scattered garbage. Usually, a specialist has to clean at least 10 cabins within 1 working day. The cleaning process does not take too long, but it does not bring positive emotions.

8. Lumberjack

This is one of the most dangerous activities in the world: lumberjacks are killed almost 11 times more often than any other professional. Cutting trees is only from the outside, it seems simple, but in fact, you have to work with specialized equipment in places of increased danger.

According to official statistics, in just 1 year, there are at least 30 thousand accidents in the field of this profession. A big threat is posed not only by working tools in the form of the sharp saw but also by large tree branches.

7. Specialist in butchering carcasses at a meat processing plant

The main task of these workers is to cut the carcasses of cows and pigs, as well as the subsequent extraction of bones and internal organs.

Approximately one in three carcass butchering specialists are injured in the course of their work. There is also a huge risk of contracting mad cow disease and E. coli.

6. Animal food taster

The task of this specialist includes the study of the aroma and taste of animal feed, as well as making decisions about the need to make changes to their recipe. Among the professional duties of a taster, there are three mandatory tests: A thorough examination of the smell, checking for the content of bone residues, and identifying the required level of cartilage in the composition.

5. Malaria Control Specialist

This work is widespread in the scientific community and is urgently needed to prevent malaria. Malaria is transmitted by Anopheles darlingi mosquitoes, which rarely fall into traps on their own. For scientific research, it is important to catch live individuals, therefore, specialists in this profession act as an intermediary.

In the process of this painful and laborious activity, workers are exposed to many bites from Anopheles mosquitoes.

4. Slaughter specialist

Representatives of this profession are constantly accompanied by severe stress and an increased fear of contracting disease-causing infections. The list of diseases that can arise during work is quite impressive: gastric infections, tuberculosis, bird flu.

3. Deodorant Expert

Representatives of this profession need to observe the condition of the armpits of the test group, recording changes in odour throughout the day. Due to its specifics, this work is rather narrowly focused and unpleasant. An expert deodorant job is open at some cosmetic companies.

2. Hazardous Waste Diver

This is one of the worst jobs in the world, with workers plunging into muddy and toxic spills. The purpose of the profession is the timely cleaning of polluted places, as well as the promotion of scientific research. The conditions in which these specialists work are extremely unpleasant: minimal visibility, tight suits, a toxic environment. (source; bbc).

1. Forensic entomologist

A specialist in this profession studies the features of the development of insects on a human corpse, as well as the consequences of their reproduction. To accurately determine the age of a corpse, a forensic entomologist determines the time of the appearance of the blowflies and larvae on it.