Jobs That No Longer Exist

Due to the adoption of technological advancements, better labor laws, and other factors. Plenty of jobs became part of history, making room for newer professions. Read on to discover 4 jobs that have disappeared over the past few centuries.

1- Cigar Girls

Cigar girls, also known as "cigarette girls" or "candy girls," were women who sold cigarettes in nightclubs, bars, casinos, and airports using a neck-strap-retained tray since the 1920s. 

Famous tobacco companies hired young, attractive promotional women to visit places where young people and big businessmen congregated, in order to promote cigarette brands to them.

With their unique uniforms, cigarette girls attracted a lot of attention. They became cultural icons and were frequently featured in Hollywood movies which made them gain widespread acceptance. But with the development of tobacco machines in the mid-1950s, cigarette girls were no longer needed, which made them disappear from the public eye.

2- Rat Catchers

Rat catchers are people who catch and kill rodents that wandered through houses for a living in the period between 1861 and 1939. They were hired by the government in Europe and The United States to keep rat populations under control and keep fatal diseases such as the bubonic plague from spreading.

A female rat only needs 21 to 23 days to give birth to a litter. So it's easy to see why London and other cities' rat problems could go from difficult to severe in the blink of an eye. It didn't take long for London, and other large cities in Europe, to recognize that they needed to find an answer to the rodent problem. A potential solution presented itself in the form of bounties. 

In the old days, rat catchers either caught the vermin by hand or used trained animals like dogs to hunt and kill them. Alternatively, they laid simple cages or used traps to capture them.

Rat catching was a dangerous job. It was common for rat catchers to suffer bites and infections. However, they prevented them from spreading to the general population.

The Rat-catcher by Pieter De Bloot

3- Herb Strewers

In the days of yore, specifically in the late 17th century, there was no indoor plumbing, and flush toilets didn't exist. Which made cities smell less than desirable. Herb strewers' role was to get rid of unpleasant aromas by distributing herbs and flowers, especially throughout the Royal British apartments. The crushed herbs such as Rosemary, chamomile, sage, lavender, and roses were used as a medieval equivalent of modern air fresheners to mask the bad odor.

The first herb Strewer was Bridget Rumney, who held the post from 1660 to 1671 and received an annual salary of 24 pounds, as well as two yards of superfine scarlet cloth for livery, as did all of her successors. The last full-time Herb Strewer was Mary Rayner, who served George III and two of his sons for a total of 43 years.

4- Knocker-uppers

Did you ever wonder how the working class used to wake up before the rise of alarm clocks? Well, in England and Ireland, the workers were woken by a person knocking on their windows. This person was called a Knocker-upper.

The knocker-uppers used to roam around working-class neighborhoods with pea-shooters and long bamboo sticks to help them reach the windows. While some knockers wouldn't leave a client's window until they were certain they had awakened them, others would simply tap several times before moving on to another house.

Mainly, the job was done by elderly men and women in larger industrial towns such as Manchester, and they were either paid one shilling per client a week or based on how far they had to travel and the time of day the person needed to be awakened. 

Now you may be wondering again, who woke the knocker-upper?

An old tongue twister tackled this dilemma:

The knocker-upper either hired another knocker to wake him up or slept during the day and woke up earlier than everyone else. This profession had died out in most places by the 1940s and 1950s due to the widespread use of electricity and reasonably priced alarm clocks.