[bright music] [sign buzzing]
- Do you know that there was a time when making hats
for a living could literally drive you crazy?
- There is dizziness and slurred speech
and mental confusion.
- It's one thing to be called mad as a hatter,
as a turn of phrase.
It's another thing to actually be a hatter
who's gone insane because of your job.
- Would you be surprised to know that there was one job
that literally sucked the life right out of you?
- These women are deep in dirty water with gaping wounds
from the leches all over their bodies.
- Or that a career as a film projectionist
was more like a disaster movie.
- It was just a stressful job.
Am I gonna catch on fire?
Am I gonna burn this whole movie house down?
- Once a fire breaks out, his only hope
is to make his way to the door,
which hopefully isn't engulfed in flames.
- These are the things we used to do
for fun, for money, or maybe out of boredom
that we'll never see again.
Were they dangerous?
Certainly.
Deadly?
Occasionally.
But boy, wasn't it exciting?
[upbeat music]
You know how construction sites have those signs
that say it's been this many days without an accident?
Well, back in the day, they didn't need those signs
because the answer was usually zero.
[upbeat music]
- Although Chicago invents the skyscraper,
one place on earth perfects it, and that is New York City.
From the early 1900s until the mid 1930s or '40s,
New York underwent a growth to the sky
unlike any other city of the time.
- [Winkler] Before modern advancements in construction,
some of the most famous buildings in America
are built very differently by workers
who risk their lives to get the job done.
- Let's talk about the type of man it takes to be like,
I am gonna go up there with no harness
and I'm gonna build those buildings,
and the evidence of this bravery
is all around us in New York City.
I mean, you look at any of these buildings
that were built in the '20s and '30s
and they were only built one way.
- Each steel girder is lifted upon one another
and they have to be manually positioned by workmen
who are straddling or walking along
these exposed steel beams.
- Imagine stepping out on a narrow steel beam,
suspended hundreds of feet up in the air over New York City,
no safety equipment, just your balance.
That was the daily life for these workers.
- Those men who are 840 feet in the air.
If you were to fall chance of survival, 0%
- [Winkler] Spectators around New York
refer to these workers as the sky boys and call them
the best open air show in town.
- [Narrator] It makes me dizzy to look at 'em,
and yet they're as nonchalant
as though they were on the avenue.
- You know, the famous photo, lunch atop of skyscraper.
It was a staged promotion for the Empire State Building,
but these people actually did hang out on beams
hundreds of feet up in the air.
- And look at that photo of those guys up there
on the I-beam sitting there eating lunch
200 feet above the air in New York City.
They look so happy to be up there.
[chuckles] I mean that's what always shocked me,
like they're always having a good time.
- As one newspaper put it, they spend their days
strolling on the thin edge of nothingness.
These jobs are so dangerous that two out of five workers
fall to their deaths or end up disabled.
- [Winkler] And their workday involves a lot more
than just balancing along beams.
They have jobs to do and none more dangerous
than the work done by the rivet gang.
- A rivet gang is a team of four men whose job it is
to fasten steel beams together with red hot rivets.
- Imagine a giant erector set, [metal clanks]
but rather than taking little screws, it's fiery hot rivets
and the rivets have to be heated on site.
All this had to be done with precision and in seconds.
- First, you have the heater,
a guy who fires up the rivets until they're red hot
in this portable forge.
The heater then hurls these rivets
up in the air, 20 or 30 feet up to the catcher,
who then uses a tin bucket to catch this red hot rivet.
- The catcher then passes it to the bucker up
who sets the rivet for the riveter
who finally drives the flaming hot rivet home.
There's nothing quite like working with a furnace
while you are a hundred stories off the ground.
There're being battened by wind,
fighting off rain, handling fiery hot rivets.
These are really talented individuals.
- Obviously a lot can go wrong during this work.
Miss a catch, and a red hot rivet
can land on an unsuspecting worker below
who would not have been wearing a hard hat
because those aren't required for another decade.
- And riveting is no small task.
A 1,000 foot skyscraper would need 10 million rivets
to hold together 50,000 tons of steel.
Means 10 million times was it heated,
thrown, caught, held, and riveted by hand.
- [Winkler] Not only is there no room for error,
there's no time for it either.
- Putting up the tallest building in the world
literally becomes a race between the Empire State Building
and the Chrysler Building.
The Chrysler Building finishes first,
but the Empire State Building takes the crown
rising to 1,453 feet after only 410 days of construction.
- [Narrator] It's world's tallest structure.
Lofted nearly quarter mile into Manhattan skies.
- 410 days.
That's one year and 45 days.
That's three years faster than the Golden Gate Bridge.
Four years faster than the Hoover Dam.
Eight years faster than the Statue of Liberty.
Today, building an average single family home
takes about seven months.
- On the Empire State Building project,
of the 3,400 workers, it was officially reported
that five lost their lives, but some report the number
at much higher, even in the hundreds.
- The dangerous anything goes skyscraper construction era
of the 1930s eventually diminishes in the 1950s
as first welding starts to replace riveting.
And secondly, stronger labor unions
call for safer working conditions.
- No more sky boys, no more lunch on the beam,
no more putting up skyscrapers in the time
it takes to play a baseball season.
- I always admire guys like that,
taking lives in their own hand
and doing really dangerous work.
That's what America used to be, a country of people
being like, yeah, I got this, and I don't think
those guys should ever be forgotten.
That's real American spirit.
- Of course, not all jobs came with risks
as obvious as working hundreds of feet above ground.
[dramatic music]
When America enters World War I in 1917,
after declaring war in Germany,
everyday Americans spring into action
to help support the effort in any way they can.
- With men fighting overseas, many women flock to factories.
For them it's their patriotic duty.
- [Winkler] One of the most coveted jobs for women
is called dial painting,
which involves using glow in the dark paint
to make equipment dials and clocks visible at night.
- Dial painting is actually very lucrative.
This job pays almost three times what a typical
you know, hourly job was paying at the time.
- One of the many draws of this job besides the money,
is that after a long day of painting,
you would sort of glow.
- The women who work in these factories
get this nickname as Ghost Girls.
I mean, it's pretty cool, right?
- This is before glow in the dark products exist
like kids stickers and toys.
So you can understand why people
are so excited about products that glow.
They wear their finest dresses to work,
so that it'll pick up in the paint and glow
when they go to the dance halls that night.
They even paint on their teeth for a truly radiant smile.
- [Winkler] Turns out what makes the paint glow in the dark
is radium, which is also highly radioactive.
- So a lot of the dials that are being painted
are very fine little lines.
So the women are taught a technique
to really get the paintbrush very pointed
and it's called lip pointing,
where they actually put the paintbrush in their mouth
and get this nice little point.
- Just to be clear, they were told to literally stick radium
in their mouths every day all day long.
- Some of them asked their supervisors,
is this actually safe?
Their supervisor said, of course it is.
- I've worked with radium
and many other radioactive elements.
Radium ain't safe.
- [Winkler] So what happens when you keep
putting radium in your mouth?
- These young women would get something called necrosis
of the jaw where your face would literally
start to rot away.
- It's estimated that they're consuming something
like 3,000 micro curies of radium a year.
That's 10 times today's safe limit
of 300 micro curies a year.
- [Winkler] The women volunteer for medical exams
to help scientists understand
the effects of nuclear fallout.
- One scientist examines five dial painters
and finds that they've ingested so much radium
that their breath is even toxic.
- [Winkler] Eventually, new safety measures
are put in place.
- Radium painting continues into the 1960s,
but with more precautions, specifically radium painters
are instructed not to put the brush in their mouth.
- Almost everything that we know about
radiation inside the body today
is because of the radium girls.
- We've all heard the warning about
not yelling fire in a crowded theater,
but it turns out in the early days of cinema,
sometimes you had to.
- In the 1880s, Eastman Kodak produced
the first commercially available motion picture film.
Then Thomas Edison creates the kinetograph,
which is the first motion picture camera,
then the era of movies begins.
- These early films are shot on a substance
called nitrate film, and nitrate film is durable,
which is what makes it perfect
for a motion picture projector.
- [Winkler] But there's a pretty big downside
as they soon discover nitrate film can't take the heat.
- Nitrate is hugely temperature sensitive
and sometimes it can just combust,
so that is a recipe for disaster.
- Keep in mind how these film projectors work.
A big incandescent light bulb is used to cast the image
of the film onto a screen, and a big bright light bulb
means an incredibly hot light bulb.
- [Narrator] Nitrate film is comparatively strong,
but it has the disadvantage of being highly flammable.
It is almost an explosive.
- These films can combust on their own
just by sitting in a hot car in the sun.
And because the chemical can generate its own oxygen,
it's practically impossible to put out.
- [Winkler] That's right.
The film used to shoot movies and project them in theaters
is so flammable it can spontaneously combust.
- Just a year after the first public viewing
of a motion picture, there's a fire at a theater in London.
Shortly after that, there's an even bigger fire
and it kills 126 people.
- So the irony of all of this happening is the idea
behind movies was to capture this art
and give people this way to escape,
except it's really just putting them all together
and then kind of half setting them on fire.
- [Winkler] After several nitrate fires in the late 1880s
and the early 1900s, movie theaters make a change.
- In the early days of movie houses,
the projector would be right there in the middle
of the theater with the patrons.
It was easy, it was cheap.
Eventually, there were so many fires that this innovation
called the projector room was created.
- They decided we'll just move the projectionist
up top above everybody.
Let's project the movie through a big glass window
with this fireproof shutter.
If the waxed around this shutter got hot enough
because of a fire, then it would slam shut,
which is great for the audience.
It would keep them safe.
- The projectionist, on the other hand, is in great danger.
Once a fire breaks out and those shutters close,
his only hope is to make his way to the door,
which hopefully isn't engulfed in flames.
- They took the poor projectionist
and they said, okay,
we're banishing you to a metal room up there,
which is gonna be hot, but it's gonna keep
everybody down in the theater safe,
so if the film does go on fire,
you're the only one that's really gonna get hurt.
- The people working as projectionists
were not high school kids
trying to make a few bucks after school.
These were highly trained union members
who had studied fire safety as well as electronics.
- It was just a stressful job.
The whole time they're nervous,
Am I gonna catch on fire,
Am I gonna burn this whole movie house down?
- It's only in the 1920s and 1930s
that we get what's called safety film.
This replaces the nitrate and celluloid with acetate.
- But the studios and the professional filmmakers
continue to use nitrate film
because the picture quality is greater.
Films like, "Citizen Kane," "Gone With The Wind,"
"Wizard of Oz," they're all shot on nitrate film.
Sure, they may have to deal with spontaneous combustion,
but for a true auteur, it's worth it.
- [Winkler] It might've been worth it
for the studios, filmmakers and moviegoers,
but for the projectionists, not so much.
- Could you imagine, you're in that projection booth
and it catches fire 'cause think about it,
you have a super hot bulb
and you have a super flammable film going over it.
They would catch up all the time.
- [Winkler] The dangers finally lead nitrate film
to be discontinued in 1951.
- Thanks to conservation efforts, you can now watch
some films from the nitrate era in digital format,
but you really don't know what you're missing.
- I'll bet that most people were unaware of the risks
for the person behind the projector,
and they probably had no idea about the hazards
faced by the workers who refined the gas
that kept our cars running.
[upbeat music]
- By 1921, automakers have a huge problem.
The engines that they use suffer from a problem
that's called engine knock.
[engine knocking]
- Some drivers are so startled by the sound,
they sometimes lose control of their vehicles.
- A scientist named Tom Midgley Jr.
discovers a chemical additive he calls T-E-L
that makes the knock go away.
- Both the automobile and the oil industry
are thrilled with Midgley's anti-knock solution.
They immediately pour money into production facilities
and start advertising its wonders.
- [Winkler] One refinery that begins using this additive
is a Standard Oil facility in the port
of New York and New Jersey,
- [Narrator] But this is only one of countless products
the refinery is constantly turning out
for the diverse needs of America.
- But within a year of production, they find that some
of the workers start to exhibit strange maladies.
- The men who work in the TEL buildings
start to exhibit insomnia, memory loss,
and these bouts of rage.
One man even starts babbling deliriously,
another gets taken out in a strait jacket.
- And this isn't just a few workers.
65% of the workforce ends up in the hospital
with some kind of mental health issue.
- Workers dubbed the factory the Loony Gas Building.
- To dismiss the concerns, Standard Oil ultimately releases
a press statement saying that these men were probably
driven to this because they worked too hard.
- [Winkler] Turns out it isn't how hard they're working,
but what they're working on.
- Well, you know how the chemical additive
is called T-E-L?
Well, that stands for Tetra-Ethyl-Lead.
The people working in the factory are handling lead
and inhaling this fumes all day long.
- The dangers of lead exposure
were already well known.
In fact, dating back to 1786,
Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to a friend
where he described his own experience
with lead's harmful effects.
- But Standard Oil is not convinced
that lead is causing these issues,
so they do something that most PR firms
today would not recommend.
They hold a press conference featuring the creator
of T-E-L himself, Thomas Midgley.
- They get Midgley there who then just basically
rinses his hands in a bowl just filled with T-E-L
saying like, look, I wouldn't do this if it was bad,
look at me.
I'm totally fine.
- Can you imagine someone doing that today?
[scoffs] Doubtful.
- Leaded gasoline still continues to be sold
for the next 70 years.
- For those of us who remember
growing up before the mid 1990s,
you will remember pulling into a gas station
and being asked if you want regular or unleaded.
- [Narrator] Most compact and imported cars can be operated
on leaded regular grade gasoline for maximum economy.
- I remember pulling in and buying regular gasoline
because it was cheaper.
- Now, leaded gas was sold up until 1996,
and you remember Midgley, right?
Well, it turns out right after that stunt,
he took a little vacation to Florida
where he was treated for lead poisoning.
- Though the US hit the brakes on leaded gas in the '90s,
it took until 2021 before the world
finally phased out leaded gasoline
for road vehicles entirely.
- There used to be a time when all men wore hats.
They were a symbol of their social status.
But in one New England town, the people making the hats
found the work a bit maddening.
- By 1890 Danbury's known as the hat city of the world.
It's 33 factories are pumping out 5 million hats a year.
- Each of these 5 million hats is made from animal fur,
either rabbit or beaver, and made through a process
called carroting.
- Carroting gets its name from the orange colored solution
that helps remove the fur from the animal
and turns it into felt.
- So you might be wondering,
what is this miracle solution made of?
Turns out it's a silvery white chemical
that we call mercury.
- The closest most people in the model world
get to mercury is in a thermometer, which if broken,
you are supposed to open a window,
throw it away, and call poison control.
- Even at low levels, mercury can cause damage
to the brain, heart, lungs, and kidneys.
- [Winkler] And what the hat makers of Danbury, Connecticut
and elsewhere are exposed to is way above low levels.
- These hat makers spend hours a day handling mercury,
which is absorbed through the skin,
but also inhaling the fumes, which go right to the lungs
and then to the brain.
- [Winkler] This leads to a huge number of hat makers
suffering from the effects of mercury poisoning.
- Mercury poisoning is pretty unpleasant.
Sufferers experience a wide variety of symptoms.
Painful itching, burning, peeling skin, a loss of hair
and teeth, swelling, sweating, and asthma.
- There's also slurred speech, dizziness, mental confusion,
which is actually the root of the expression
as mad as a hatter.
- It turns out that you don't get poisoned
from wearing the hats, just from making them.
That's because the hats have a protective lining
that prevents the mercury from seeping into your brain.
- The hat manufacturers aren't particularly concerned.
In fact, they often attribute workers' health problems
to alcoholism because they share a lot
of the same outward symptoms like slurred speech,
confusion, and tremors.
- So eventually the use of mercury in hat making
comes to an end, but it's not because of the poisoning.
In 1914, the war in Europe breaks out and mercury
is too important to the war effort to be used in hat making.
Not only that, but fashion is a fickle beast as we know,
so by the Great Depression, tall felt hats
have fallen out of style, at least for men.
- Hat making wasn't the only profession where they neglected
to put the risks in the job description.
When X-ray technology was brought to shoe stores,
the results weren't exactly a perfect fit.
- In 1895, a German physicist, Wilhelm Rontgen,
discovers a radioactive wave everywhere.
He doesn't know what to call it, so he calls it the X-rays.
Through the miracle of X-rays, doctors can see bones,
can see structure, and then better ascertain
what treatments patients will need.
- [Winkler] A doctor in Boston, Jacob Lowe realizes
that he can use X-rays in his practice
and comes up with an innovative device.
- Lowe designs an X-ray machine for a foot,
and it's essentially a box.
The bottom of the box has an X-ray tube
and then a slot just above it for where the foot goes in,
and then there's a screen on top
which people can look down on and see the bones in the foot.
- [Winkler] The device allows Dr. Lowe to examine patients
suffering from foot pain without needing
to remove their shoes, which gives him an idea.
- Lowe is trying to figure out what to do
with this machine he's invented,
and then it hits him, retail shoe stores.
- Lowe modifies his device and brings it
to a shoe retailers convention in Boston in 1920.
He names it the Foot-O-Scope and it immediately generates
a lot of interest within the industry.
- Lowe starts the X-ray Foot-O-Scope Corporation.
He finds a manufacturer to build his machine
and starts taking orders.
- In March, 1920, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette
reports that the foot scope helps diagnose
a misaligned big toe of a local lion tamer.
You can't beat that for publicity.
- By the fall, shoe stores are running newspaper ads
promoting this brand new device.
- [Winkler] Soon shoe salesmen around the country
are clamoring for the machine.
- These machines become standard for the industry,
and the result is shoe salesmen
have to become these X-ray technicians.
These machines are so popular through the 1930s,
'40s and into the '50s.
More than 10,000 of these shoe fitting devices
are sold to stores across America.
- It should be noted the absurdity of this situation.
There are X-ray machines, not in hospitals
or laboratories administered by doctors or scientists.
They're in shoe stores administered by shoe salesman.
- When you slide your feet into the bottom,
you are basically standing directly
on top of an X-ray tube.
There is no protection at all.
People are doing it repeatedly, and the shoe salespeople
are in there all day getting exposed to X-rays.
- Salesmen are constantly putting their hands in
and out of the machines, and we know today
just to get a single dental X-ray,
they throw that heavy lead thing
over you just for one X-ray.
- I mean, I get it.
If there was a safe way for me able to look at my bones,
I would totally take it.
But that is not what happened.
If you were a shoe salesman,
you were around that machine all day.
Your job isn't bad enough,
but you're also getting bombarded with radiation.
[explosion booms]
- [Winkler] It's not until after World War II ends
that the general public becomes more aware
of the potential dangers of radiation.
- The atomic bomb makes radiation real for people,
but that doesn't mean that stores
immediately get rid of their Foot-O-Scopes.
After all, they paid a great deal of money
for these machines, and they're incredibly effective
at bringing customers into the store.
- One shoe store owner has bragged
that he has put his own feet in one 30 times
in a single day, and he feels fine.
How could a scientist argue with that?
- But actual evidence begins to mount.
Reports of shoe store salesmen getting radiation burns
and tissue damage begins to circulate.
- In 1953, the Food and Drug Administration steps in
and bans the devices outright.
Shoe store X-ray machines become a thing of the past.
- Today we get our feet measured in a simpler,
probably more efficient way, thanks to what's known
as the Brannock Device.
That's right, that metal contraption has a name.
And we leave X-rays to medical professionals.
- Most jobs are difficult.
Some take sweat, some take tears,
but this next profession took blood
and it quite literally sucked.
- At the turn of the 19th century,
American physicians use procedures
that date back millennia to treat their patients.
They apply leeches.
- Leeches ability to remove germs and bacteria from blood
means the doctors continue to use them on their patients,
putting them on their throats and thighs.
- Leeches are not easy to obtain, which brings about one
of the most gruesome, dangerous,
hazardous and sort of grossest professions in history.
- Leeches are collected in the wild and in the early 1800s,
they were most often collected by poor women.
They're called, Leech Collectors.
- They would hoist up their skirts
and wade into dirty bogs, ponds, marshes,
and they would catch these leches by hand
and by leg and arm and ugh,
wherever the leches would just attach,
they were basically human traps.
- The leech collectors have to wait for the leches to fill
with their blood before they can be collected.
Think about it for a second.
You're standing waist deep in a bog
watching this little blood sucker attach itself to you,
get engorged with your own blood
and you're paid just pennies for it.
- The leches suck on the legs of the collector
for up to 30 minutes.
If you consider that each leech ingests one to two teaspoons
of blood, multiply that by the hundreds of leeches
that these women have attached to them each day.
That is serious blood loss.
- Even the act of pulling the leech off is a nightmare.
They're easiest to remove once they're fully fed,
but that still doesn't mean that there aren't risks.
If you improperly remove the leech,
its jaws can remain behind.
- A leech collector's risk of infection is through the roof.
These women are deep in dirty water with gaping wounds
from the leches all over their bodies.
They're subject to cholera,
dysentery, typhoid, and hepatitis.
Common diarrhea is probably the least of their concerns.
- And you thought your workplace was bad
'cause someone ate your lunch.
- [Winkler] The 20th century sees the medical community
move away from the human leech collectors
and to a safer, more hygienic method.
- By the 1930s and '40s, leeches used in medical procedures
are actually coming from certified
and sterile labs that are growing leches
specifically for medical purposes.
The day of the old swamp to skin leech is over.
- Leches are used today in plastic
and reconstructive surgeries.
That's because the natural anticoagulants
that they secrete prevent blood clots
and help to restore blood flow.
- In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration
officially approves leeches as a medical device
and requires them to be disposed of
in those red sharps containers just like needles.
So that means that the FDA now has to control
and approve your beef, your prescriptions,
your eyeliner, and your leeches.
- Collecting leeches had many women tempting fate,
but with this next job, the women were playing with fire.
- While humans have been making fire for 2 million years,
it isn't until the early 1800s
that we finally figure out how to do it a lot more easily.
- In 1826, John Walker, a chemist in England,
discovers that a piece of stick
coated with certain chemicals can light on fire
when scratched across his fireplace.
- [Winkler] He calls them friction matches.
- These early friction matches, they don't work that well.
Sometimes they don't light at all
because you have to scrape them so hard to get them going.
- Luckily, by the 1840s, chemists come up
with a great new solution, white phosphorus.
Matches made with white phosphorus
can be lit on almost any surface with very little effort.
It's a real game changer and it's a huge innovation.
- These days we take for granted
how easy it is to start a fire, but in the old days,
you had to rub two sticks together or find some flint.
You needed to be a MacGyver.
So people go nuts for these miracle fire starters.
Pretty soon there are dozens of factories
that can churn out 10 million matches a day.
- The factories making these matches
are typically staffed by young women.
It's one of the few jobs they can actually get.
So in that way, it's a pretty sweet gig.
- The women who work in these factories
even get a cool nickname, the Matchstick Girls.
- [Winkler] But there's a problem.
White phosphorus is a very dangerous chemical.
- Today, the most common use of white phosphorus
is by the military for making grenades and artillery shells.
- White phosphorus can burn your skin,
it can burn your eyes, and it can irritate your lungs.
- The gums would glow in the dark, teeth could fall out,
and prolonged exposure could make their jaws disintegrate.
- Doctors at the time refer to this condition as phossy jaw.
Phossy is short for phosphorus.
You know, things are pretty bad when the medical profession
is coming up with this weird nickname.
- [Winkler] Not exactly the kind of substance
you'd wanna handle all day, every day.
- Eventually chemists come up with a new innovation,
a new product, and by 1910, white phosphorus
is being phased out.
- Today we use red phosphorus, a much safer alternative.
And that's why your favorite matches have red tips.
- For most of us, the last time
we saw a chimney sweep was in, "Mary Poppins."
But did you ever wonder how a full grown man
could get inside a chimney to do that job?
The answer was he didn't, but someone else did.
[people screaming]
- So in 1666, a massive fire just spreads across London.
It completely guts the city.
This prompts a change in the building code
requiring much narrower chimneys.
- Chimneys at the time weren't long
and straight like they are today.
They were curved.
They were at jagged angles,
and so you couldn't just take a simple tool
and run it down the length of the chimney.
- These chimneys that used to be this big
that a man could just walk in and clean out
are now about this big.
So they need smaller people to go ahead and do the job.
- [Winkler] Throughout most of Europe
and the United States, if your chimney's being swept,
it's likely a kid is doing the sweeping.
- These young boys sort of clamber up
with their scraping tools and their brushing tools.
When they get to the top, they slide right back down.
They collect the pile of soot,
they give it to the master sweep,
who then sells it to farmers as fertilizer.
- Some of these chimneys are 60 feet tall,
and the opening inside is between nine and 14 inches wide.
- [Winkler] When the pressure is on
to get the job done fast, the boss has a solution
that would be frowned upon today.
- These master chimney sweeps had a way
of motivating the apprentices.
You've heard the expression light a fire under someone.
Well, this is where that expression comes from.
- The way to get kids to sweep up to like 20 chimneys a day
is to literally light a fire under them
to quote, unquote, motivate them to get up that chimney
and clean it as fast as possible.
- Now, you probably think of yourself, how is this possible?
How is it okay to just shove kids in chimneys
with a broom and let them sweep it?
Oh, that's because the first child labor laws
weren't until 1916.
- What brings an end to this practice
is actually innovation.
Joseph Glass, an engineer, designs a new method
for cleaning chimneys that is much more efficient.
- He develops a chimney sweep device
that consists of a series of rods
that are capable of bending, so that the device
can follow the curves and the angles of the chimney,
and this becomes the chimney sweep brush that we know today.
- If you thought sending children up chimneys was wild,
there was another job where kids
had to be fast on their feet or watch out.
[pins clacking]
- Bowling has been popular in the US since the mid 1800s,
but it wasn't until 1951 when an automatic pin setter
was actually used.
So, who is setting up all those pins all those years?
It was a bunch of boys down at the end of the alley.
- [Winkler] Starting in the early 1900s,
pin boys are a common fixture
in bowling alleys across the us.
- It's funny to think about situations
that will never exist again because time has moved on.
Imagine it.
You got your first job, you're a pin boy.
You're gonna set up those pins.
- [Winkler] Pin boys work very hard for their money.
- They would either sit on a ledge
or straddle the lane dividers, repositioning the pins,
and then quickly hopping out of the way between throws.
[pins clacking]
- So you also have to be on high alert at all times
because there are just projectiles flying.
You'd have to get down on your stomach
and slide through to reset one pin.
- [Winkler] By the 1930s, major American cities
have hundreds of bowling alleys,
each employing multiple pin boys per shift.
- Speed was such an important element of this job
for the teenager trying to reset everything
because a lot of times the people that were bowling
may have had a few drinks.
- Everybody drinks, everybody bowls.
Suddenly you got some big drunk jerk with his bowling team.
- Sometimes they would get a little crass,
maybe think the pin setter's
not setting the pins fast enough for them.
And guess what?
They're just gonna lob one down at 'em.
- Could you imagine?
He got some drunk guy and he throws his bowl
and he misses completely.
If this kid's getting just crap on him from this guy
who missed it, 'cause he's a bad bowler.
- Sometimes people wonder why we have
such strict child labor laws.
It's 'cause of what we used to do to kids in this country
so that we could go bowling.
- [Winkler] But regulations aren't the main reason
the job of pin boys becomes a thing of the past.
- So who do these boys have to thank
for getting them out of harm's way?
- His name was Fred Schmidt.
He developed an automatic pin setter
and the rest is history.
- Today we take modern conveniences for granted,
like how bowling balls are returned automatically.
- The potential dangers for being a mail carrier
seem very obvious.
Dog bites, extreme weather.
But in the early 20th century, they were dying
to get you your mail faster.
- [Narrator] Washington, DC, had been selected
as the starting point for a sensational innovation
in modern communication.
The mail was going to take to the air.
- In 1918, the US Post Office
establishes its first air mail service.
For just 24 cents an ounce,
you can have your post delivered to New York,
to Washington, to Philadelphia.
It's such a big deal that President Woodrow Wilson
is there to witness the event.
The plan is for one pilot each to take off
from Washington and from New York.
Together, they'll meet in Philadelphia,
they'll exchange their parcels, and then two other pilots
will finish the respective journeys.
- [Winkler] Unfortunately, things don't get off
to a flying start.
- Thousands of people have gathered in a field in DC
to watch the first air mail flight
and the pilot, Army Lieutenant George Boyle,
he's about to take off when they realize,
oh, there's no gas in the plane.
They forgot to fuel the plane.
- It seems obvious today,
but this is the early days of aviation.
There aren't the safety measures, the checklists,
even the instrumentation that can guarantee
that a plane's going to take off.
They refuel the plane and the Curtiss Jenny takes off,
Boyle at the helm on the way for the first leg
from Washington to Philadelphia.
- Once he's in the air, Boyle rapidly gets lost,
so he decides to make an emergency landing
at a Maryland farm to get directions.
- As he descends to make his landing,
Boyle wrecks his propeller and the plane
is no longer air worthy.
He gathers up his mail and returns to DC in disgrace.
The whole operation is a huge failure.
- [Winkler] Things for air mail pilots
only get worse and more dangerous from there.
- The truth is flying these planes in the early days
of aviation, it just isn't safe.
They're very basic.
They have open cockpits, no safety features,
no radios, no navigation tools.
That's it.
- If they have to land and it's foggy
or there's no visibility for whatever reason,
they just basically have to land the plane on a prayer.
- So in the first week of operation
six pilots flying for the post office die.
The planes the post office are using
aren't even the best for the time.
The one they're typically using is the De Havilland DH-4,
which has this fantastic nickname, the Flaming Coffin,
and that's because it's got this design flaw
where the fuel tank sits between the engine and the cockpit.
- This makes the planes prone to explosions
in a bad landing, but they are Army surplus planes
from World War I, so they're free,
so the Post Office is gonna use them anyway.
- From 1918 to 1927, around 230 men fly for the Post Office
and more than 30 die in crashes.
The life expectancy for these pilots is estimated
to be around 900 hours of flying.
That's less than 40 days.
- [Winkler] These brave workers are given a nickname,
the Suicide Club.
- You might think with the dangers of flying
and also the fatalities associated with flying air mail,
that this would be a job that nobody wanted,
but thousands of people apply for these positions
to fly air mail.
There's something about the aura and the idea
of flying a plane and flying a plane for the US government
for the mail that is very attractive to young men.
- One of the most famous airmail pilots
is none other than Charles Lindbergh.
Before he flies solo across the Atlantic, he makes headlines
for surviving multiple air mail crashes, including one
where he parachutes into a barbed wire fence.
- [Winkler] Eventually, air mail gets safer
thanks to regulations and a little bit of help.
- Almost as quickly as the postal service
gets into the air mail business.
They start getting out of it.
In 1925, they begin outsourcing some airmail delivery
to commercial airlines.
And by 1927, all air mail is now being
handled by commercial airlines.
- I think that sometimes we look back on some of these ideas
and we're like, we never should have done those things.
And maybe they're right, but we need to try these things
because if we don't, we're losing out on something bigger.
- When thinking about the ways we used to work
from radioactive shoe stores to sending kids up chimneys
to building skyscrapers without a net,
danger was business as usual.
Sure, occupational hazards were everywhere,
but as we learned to work smarter, not just harder,
it paved the way for new innovations
and navigating our hazardous history
was all part of the job.