20 Jobs That Vanished When Jet Travel Took Over The World

The Shotgun Messenger rode next to the driver on the box seat of the Wells Fargo stagecoaches. He carried a short-barreled shotgun across his lap to protect the company’s iron boxes filled with gold and cash payrolls from robbers crossing the American West. It was here that the English language gained the idiom “riding shotgun,” even though it wouldn’t appear widely in print until 1919, decades after the work itself began. Eventually, secure rail mail cars and air freight made armed stagecoach guards pointless.

Pullman Porters were Black sleeping-car attendants who worked for the Pullman Company, turning seats into berths, dishing out dinner in rail cars for overnight trips, and doing long monthly shifts that stretched them far beyond their limits. A labor organizer named A. Philip Randolph formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925 to advocate for better wages and treatment. It was 12 more years before it became the first union led by African Americans to negotiate a contract with a large American corporation. Airplanes eventually destroyed the sleeping-car business that created the job.

In special Railway Post Office (RPO) cars attached to express trains, clerks sorted and bundled mail as they memorized thousands of towns along their routes. At small stations where the train didn’t even stop, a clerk would stand in the doorway of his car and use a mechanical steel “catcher arm” to snag mailbags off trackside cranes as the train roared by at up to 60 miles an hour. By the late 1960s, the entire system had vanished after the Post Office began shifting long-distance mail to airplanes and trucks starting in 1958.

Deep within the ship’s belly, coal passers pushed their wheelbarrows of coal from the storage bunkers up to the stokehold floor, where stokers shoveled it through the furnace doors. The heat exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit. A large transatlantic liner required more than 150 of these men, collectively known as the “black gang,” to shovel out hundreds of tons of coal per day merely to maintain their scheduled arrival. Their work was already in decline well before air travel became common, as shipping companies transitioned to oil fuel in the early 1920s.

Rigid airship riggers kept the passengers of the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg aloft by walking unpressurized catwalks through the dark belly of the airship, among the gas bags, while the ship was airborne. It was dangerous work. There they’d check cell tension, patch up tears, and service engines that were housed outside in gondolas. Passenger airship service had been in operation only since 1928. Commercial passenger flights ended abruptly on May 6, 1937, when the Hindenburg burst into flames above Lakehurst, New Jersey, taking the entire industry with it.

Harvey Girls were uniformed waitresses who worked in depot restaurants along a major Western railway, beginning with the first Harvey House in the 1870s. Long before dining cars became common, trains pulled into a station for a 30-minute water break. In that time, the Harvey Girls fed four-course meals to hundreds of passengers, taking their orders in code and serving in perfect synchronization. More than 100,000 women took the job over the decades. Under contract, they had to remain unmarried for months at a time. Dining cars and air travel rendered the depot-stop system they ran on obsolete.

Marconi wireless operators worked in small radio rooms aboard ocean liners, passing on passenger telegrams and relaying news via Morse code, but they weren’t part of the ship’s crew. Instead, they were contractors hired by Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company and put aboard liners as part of an arrangement separate from the shipping lines. The first commercial passenger-ship wireless set was loaded aboard a German liner in February 1900 and sent the first live ship-to-shore messages. Jets ending multi-day crossings, followed by automated and satellite radio, finished the job off.

Newsboys called “news butchers” peddled magazines and candy from hampers slung over their shoulders as they moved up and down the aisle of long-distance trains for a commission. A teenage Thomas Edison became a news butcher and even began publishing his own miniature newspaper in a train’s baggage car, until a chemistry experiment gone wrong set it on fire. Walt Disney worked the same position for a railroad in the Midwest in his teens. With shorter flights and a dining car available, news butchers soon became a thing of the past.

In the days of the ocean liner, elevators were operated by hand by so-called “lift boys.” Using control levers, they started, leveled, and stopped their elevators across as many as ten decks, all while adjusting for the ship’s rolling motion in heavy seas. In 1912, the Titanic had three first-class elevators and a second-class elevator, all operated by hand by young men. The invention of automated push-button elevators and the decline in ocean liner travel in 1958 spelled the end of the lift boy position.

Whips, or reinsmen, controlled four- or six-horse teams from an open coach box, sometimes driving dozens of miles per shift before passing the reins on to a relay. One well-known mail route covered nearly 2,800 miles between St. Louis and San Francisco in under a month. Whips had absolute control over their passengers’ safety and mail delivery times on coaches with more than a dozen people aboard. Eventually, the invention of the railway, and then aviation, eliminated the need for long-distance stage routes.

Canal boat mule drivers, or “hoggees,” walked draft animals along towpaths beside canals while towing passengers in packet boats at a strict four miles per hour for six-hour shifts in rain or shine. The speed limit was intended to prevent boats from wearing down the banks of the canal. The future President James A. Garfield had been a teenage hoggee on the Ohio and Erie Canal, decades after the United States’ canal craze started. Railway expansion eventually made the sluggish packet boats obsolete well before the invention of the airplane.

For a short while, ship’s buglers walked the decks and corridors of ocean liners 30 minutes before dinner time to sound a traditional brass call to alert passengers that mealtime was approaching, then play “The Roast Beef of Old England,” the official bugle call for dinner in first class on British shipping lines. Percy Fletcher was a bugler on the Titanic in April 1912, and buglers were also often stewards. The introduction of loudspeaker systems in the 1930s and the end of ocean liner service after 1958 rendered the job unnecessary.

Postilions, also known as post-boys, drove post-chaises and mail coaches along European and North American post roads between the 1600s and mid-1800s, conveying dispatches and affluent passengers. Rather than taking the seat on the coach box, the postilion rode astride the left-hand horse of the team, keeping his right arm available to wield the whip and manage the unmounted horse alongside him. Despite being called post-boys, these jobs were done by grown men. The advent of railways, followed by airmail, rendered horse-drawn posts obsolete.

Railway track walkers walked isolated sections of mainline track daily on foot, regardless of weather conditions, looking for any cracks at rail joints, spikes, or switches that could allow a high-speed passenger train to derail. They carried small explosive caps known as track torpedoes that were clamped to the rails, which would explode with a loud noise and serve as a warning of danger ahead to any engineer approaching. The job was eventually eliminated by automated inspection cars and by the decline in long-distance passenger rail travel as air travel became more popular.

Ship’s typesetters had small print shops aboard ocean liners, where they would hand-set lead type to make daily shipboard newspapers from international news received overnight by wireless, as well as menus and passenger lists. Cunard had even been producing its own shipboard paper, the Daily Atlantic Communication, as early as 1904. Printers had to strap down trays of loose lead type to prevent them from spilling over during heavy rolls. The advent of commercial aviation, which ended the days-long isolation of traveling by ship, coupled with modern digital printing, ultimately put the job out of business.

Bath stewards took care of shared bathrooms and bath time on ocean liners because even first-class rooms didn’t have a private bath until the 1950s, and there were over 100 steerage passengers to 1 bathtub. Because fresh water was heavily rationed for drinking and cooking, the stewards would fill the tub with hot seawater and hand out a small bucket of fresh water for a final rinse. Modern ships’ private plumbing and air travel, which reduced transit times across oceans, made the job obsolete.

At sea, masters-at-arms in charge of discipline on ocean liners patrolled the decks and ran the ship’s jail when the vessel sailed beyond national boundaries. On transatlantic routes, a constant challenge was catching crooked card players and con men who preyed upon wealthy travelers in the first-class smoking rooms. Many shipping lines, including Cunard and White Star, put up notices warning passengers not to engage in high-stakes card games with unfamiliar passengers. When jet service began in 1958 and brought the crossing time down to a few hours, both the passage and the attendant gambling lifestyle became a thing of the past.

Deck stewards would set out rows of teak deck chairs, wrap passengers in heavy wool lap robes, and set out games such as shuffleboard. One fixed routine on the great ocean liners was serving up steaming cups of hot beef bouillon to deck-chair passengers every late morning, then returning in the afternoon to serve them tea. It’s hardly surprising that when jet service began in 1958, cutting the crossing from days to mere hours, the entire deck culture that these jobs were part of went away too.

Firemen were crew members in a steam engine’s cab. They shoveled 10 to 20 tons of coal into the firebox for each trip to maintain the heat needed to move long-distance passenger trains. In addition to shoveling, firemen manipulated air dampers, observed the water level in the boilers, and looked out for trackside warning signals. American railroads converted entirely from steam to diesel-electric power between 1948 and 1960. At about that same time, airlines were luring long-distance travelers off the railroads, and coal-shoveling firemen were finished.

Pan Am hired flying boat stewards to serve transoceanic passengers aboard its Boeing 314 Clipper aircraft at a time when paved international airfields were scarce, and planes often had to land in water. These men were recruited from hotels and ocean liners and offered first-class service, preparing five-course meals on porcelain dishes and turning seats into beds for overnight flights. The flying boat steward position was short-lived because big airports built during World War II allowed commercial airlines to transition to landplanes soon after, and the days of floating dining rooms were over.

This content was created with the help of AI.