Obsolete Jobs That Were Totally Normal 100 Years Ago

It’s weird to think about, but a hundred years ago, a lot of perfectly respectable jobs sound totally fake now. Not just outdated but bizarre. Whole professions that were once absolutely necessary are now gone. Some of them disappeared because technology evolved. Others vanished because society shifted. And a few are so strange, it’s hard to believe they ever existed in the first place.

So, let’s get into it.

Knocker-uppers

Imagine it’s 5 a.m., and instead of an alarm clock, a person walks up to your window and taps it with a stick until you wake up. That was the literal job of a knocker-upper. Mostly common in the UK and parts of Ireland into the 1920s and even 1930s, knocker-uppers were hired to wake people, especially factory workers, in time for their shifts. Some used long bamboo poles, others pebbles or pea-shooters. And yes, there were occasional complaints when the knocker-uppers fell asleep on the job.

 Lamplighters

Streetlights didn’t always glow automatically when the sun went down. Before electricity, cities relied on gas lamps, and those lamps had to be lit by hand. Enter the lamplighter. These workers would go around at dusk with a ladder and a long pole, lighting every streetlamp one by one. Then they’d come back around at dawn to snuff them out. In some places, lamplighters also served as night watchmen or informal public safety officers.

Pinsetters

Bowling became wildly popular in the early 20th century, but before automatic pin-setting machines, someone had to reset the pins manually after each roll. That someone was usually a teenage boy called a pinsetter. The job was repetitive, low-paying, and came with a decent risk of getting whacked by a stray ball. You’d reset the pins, roll the ball back to the player, and hope you didn’t get hit in the process. It was also a bit of a social scene; bowling alleys were often rowdy places, and pinsetters saw it all. By the 1950s, most alleys had switched over to automatic machines.

Human Computers

Before we had electronic computers, we had actual human beings doing complex math by hand, and they were called, literally, “computers.” These were mostly women, hired for their attention to detail and math skills, especially during both World Wars. They worked in astronomy, ballistics, weather forecasting, and early space exploration. You’ve probably heard about them if you’ve seen Hidden Figures — the NASA “computers” who helped calculate rocket trajectories in the early space race.

Typists & Dictation Clerks

There was a time when just being able to type efficiently was a full-blown career. Offices were full of trained typists, often women, whose job was to take handwritten notes, shorthand dictation, or even direct audio and convert it into clean, formatted text. Dictation clerks would listen to executives speak and transcribe in real time. In many ways, they were the original voice-to-text. Of course, we now live in the age of voice memos, Dragon Dictation, Google Docs, and laptops in every meeting room. Typists? Not so much.