Someone tapped on your bedroom window to wake you. Someone connected your telephone call. Someone stood behind the bowling pins, waiting to put them back. Everyday life once depended on workers doing tasks that many of us now expect machines to handle.
These ten occupations, drawn mainly from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and North America, reveal the labor hidden inside ordinary routines. Some demanded considerable skill. Others exposed children and adults to exhausting or dangerous conditions. A few survive in limited or altered forms.
Their stories are more interesting than a list of supposedly extinct jobs. They show how technology, poverty and changing expectations shaped the working day, and how slowly a new invention could replace an established way of doing things.
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