20 Deadly Jobs That Once Paid Surprisingly Well

Young women at the United States Radium Corporation in New Jersey shaped their paintbrushes with their lips in a routine known as lip, dip, paint, coating watch dials with luminous radium paint. The work paid them three times as much as other factory jobs for women. While company chemists used lead shields and tongs to handle the same radium, they told the painters that radium was safe. In reality, exposure to the radioactive substance caused devastating health problems, like rotting jawbones and weak, brittle bones throughout their bodies. In a historic lawsuit, one of the painters, Grace Fryer, fought for and won for her fellow survivors a cash settlement, annuity, and medical treatment.

In the early 1930s, high scalers building Hoover Dam dangled from Manila ropes and wooden bosun’s chairs down 800-foot cliffs in 120-degree desert heat. With jackhammers and dynamite, they chipped loose rock before it could fall onto workers far below. Falling rock was the number-one killer on the project. They were paid more than the going rate in the Great Depression for the danger. The scalers hardened their tar-dipped cloth caps into early hard hats, which encouraged the dam’s contractor to eventually require headgear.

Chuck Yeager, a USAF Captain, became the first pilot to break the sound barrier when he flew the Bell X-1 in 1947, launching a decade of test flights from Edwards Air Force Base in California. In those 10 years, Edwards lost pilots testing experimental jet and rocket planes at nearly a 25% fatality rate, which was about one death a month. Private contractors made far more money than the average worker, and military pilots collected base pay as well as hazard bonuses for doing the same job.

The riveting gangs building skyscrapers like the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings tossed rivets heated red-hot through the air and caught them in tin cans. They hammered the rivets into steel beams hundreds of feet above ground without harnesses or nets. Riveters from Kahnawake, a Mohawk Indian community, became especially renowned for their efforts. Pay was sometimes two or three times what any other tradesman would receive.

Pilots of the newly established U.S. Post Office’s Air Mail Service flew open-cockpit biplanes, often leftovers from World War I. There was no radio, no lighted runways. Pilots navigated by paper maps strapped to their legs, flying treacherous routes such as the Allegheny Mountains, a section known as “Hell Hole.” Post Office superintendents ordered pilots to take off in blizzards and thick fog, warning they’d be fired if they refused. Roughly one in every seven pilots died in the course of service during its first decade. The pay was significantly higher than the average industrial wage, and it attracted men such as a young Charles Lindbergh before his famous flight across the Atlantic.

The Sandhogs labored underground in airtight, pressurized chambers called caissons beneath New York’s East River during construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, which chief engineer Washington Roebling oversaw. They were paid about twice what they would normally have earned doing surface labor. Doctors attributed the resulting pain and paralysis to cold or fatigue, when the true culprit was actually bubbles of nitrogen forming in their bloodstream. Three of the bridge’s fatalities were attributed to the disease. Roebling, too, ended up confined to his bed.

In the 1860s, oil companies began using nitroglycerin to increase production from wells that had slowed or stopped flowing. The practice involved workers known as “oil well shooters,” who lowered canisters of liquid nitroglycerin deep into the wells and detonated them to fracture the surrounding rock, allowing more crude oil to flow. Nitroglycerin was extremely volatile, liable to go off with even a bump or change in temperature as a shooter carried it by hand over rough roads. A good shot was worth much more than an oilfield worker made in a day, but there was no room for mistakes as one wrong move could mean death.

Ormer Locklear, the original star of Hollywood’s 1920s craze for filming aerial stunts and a veteran of World War I, would walk between the wings of two biplanes as they flew through the air without a safety wire, before CGI and camera tricks. While standard film actors were paid a few dollars per day, stuntmen could make much more for performing a significant stunt, and still more for enacting a plane crash. Sadly, Locklear was killed during the filming of a night stunt for The Skywayman in 1920.

Boatsteerers sat in the bow of the open whaleboat, rowed toward the whale, and threw the first harpoon at it. The harpoon did not kill the whale, which could weigh as much as 60 tons, but simply tethered it, and sometimes the whale dragged the whaleboat along rapidly in a maneuver known as a “Nantucket sleighride.” And then they finished off the whale with a separate lance. Boatsteerers received their pay in a lay, which is a percentage of the voyage’s profits, while unskilled deckhands frequently ended a voyage in debt to the ship.

Around 1900, linemen climbed poles to string live, uninsulated high-voltage power lines without rubber gloves or insulated tools, frequently at places where the lines crossed over the telegraph lines and could easily short out, electrocuting anyone in the path of the current. At the time, it was believed that one in three linemen would be killed on the job. Linemen also earned more than the average skilled tradesman. When a lineman for Western Union was publicly electrocuted in Manhattan, the other workers began organizing what eventually became the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Pearlers off Broome, Australia, worked in hard-hat diving rigs and heavy canvas suits to gather mother-of-pearl shell. They faced drowning, shark attacks, and decompression sickness if they surfaced too rapidly. Divers were paid for the weight of shell they recovered, more than £100 per tonne, a wage high enough to draw men into a profession that claimed the lives of almost 50% of those who worked it during its first few decades.

Myron Kinley invented a method of fighting fires on out-of-control oil wells. He packed explosives, usually nitroglycerin, around the wellhead, then fired them, burning off enough of the surrounding oxygen to extinguish the flames and give him a chance to cap the well. For this, he received contracts and expense accounts and spent decades from the 1920s through the 1940s raking in the cash. He also sustained third-degree burns and a crushed leg. And his brother, Floyd Kinley, died when he was hit by falling rig debris during a blowout in Texas.

The workers in mercury mines and smelters of the 1890s pulled out and processed quicksilver ore, inhaling its vapors day after day. It’s a slow poison called mercurialism, causing tremors and slow damage to the nervous system. However, it paid well, well above standard hard-rock mining rates.

Before the advent of water-flushed drills, “machine men” running heavy pneumatic drills in hard-rock gold and copper mines would labor in clouds of fine quartz dust created by dry drilling. Inhaling this dust caused silicosis, which was often lethal because of its correlation with tuberculosis. In a British study from the early 1900s, the majority of Cornish machine drillers had died of lung disease at a much younger age than the men who did their drilling manually. These machine men were paid two or three times the hand-miner rate.

Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895. Technicians working with fluoroscope machines in hospitals had no protective lead aprons, no rules of distance from the machine, and no dosimeters. So they used their own hands as a standard for calibration, holding them directly in the unshielded beam. These jobs were high-paying, at specialist rates which were several times higher than the average person’s salary. Clarence Dally, Thomas Edison’s main glassblower and assistant during X-ray experiments, had both arms amputated because of radiation-induced cancer. He died at 39, and Edison quit doing X-ray research.

From the 1840s to the 1920s, river drivers rode down rivers in Maine, Michigan, and Canada’s Ottawa Valley, guiding logs cut over the winter. They stood atop the logs in spiked boots, urging them along and keeping them from piling up against each other and creating jams. To free such jams, river drivers would climb on top of the logs in search of the key log holding the pile together and might use dynamite to break it loose. Few of these men could swim, and falling under the moving logs was practically a death sentence. River driving lasted for just a few weeks in the spring, but the work paid nearly twice as much as being a lumberjack during the winter. One particularly disastrous year, over 80 drivers drowned or were crushed to death in the Ottawa Valley alone.

During the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, Canadian police forced every miner going into the Yukon goldfields to carry a year’s supply of food, ensuring that porters, such as Native Tlingit packers, had constant work on the treacherous Chilkoot Pass. Pack horses perished en route, so packers were paid by the pound, and one load of gear to the top of the ice-hewn stairs on the pass could earn far more than a laborer’s ordinary day’s wage. More than 50 people died when an avalanche struck the pass. A couple of years later, tramways made packers obsolete.

Workers at DuPont’s Eleutherian Mills explosives plant on Delaware’s Brandywine River mixed black powder barefoot or in wooden-pegged shoes and used only wooden tools. They worked in a series of lightweight huts with loose-fitting roofs to channel an explosion upward. A single static spark was enough to flatten one of these buildings. Workers were paid much more than textile workers and received housing and pensions. The mills exploded hundreds of times over the years, killing more than 220 workers. Founder E.I. du Pont kept a family rule that nobody could go into a new or repaired mill until a company director had personally run it first.

At open-hearth steel mills such as Pittsburgh’s Homestead Works and Indiana’s Gary Works, “teemers” used a hand lever to control a crane-mounted ladle that poured up to 200 tons of 3,000-degree liquid steel into molds. If the nozzle malfunctioned or the molten metal struck wet concrete, a steam explosion could spray molten white-hot steel across the floor. Teemers made twice or three times the wages of general mill laborers through tonnage bonuses in the 1920s because a poor pour ruined entire loads of multi-ton steel.

Bill Haast launched the Miami Serpentarium in 1947 and spent decades pinning the heads of cobras, mambas, and vipers, forcing their fangs through a membrane across a glass beaker. That venom was then turned into antivenom, not directly, but by injecting small amounts of it into horses or sheep and harvesting the antibodies those animals produced to fight it off. Dry venom was worth more than its weight in gold. Haast extracted venom from tens of thousands of coral snakes, survived 172 bites from venomous snakes, and lived to the age of 100.

This content was created with the help of AI.