Do you remember when delivering pizza
in 30 minutes or less
was a dangerous way to make some dough?
If it's not delivered in 30 minutes, it's free?
People are rooting against the delivery guy.
They want them to fail.
You were definitely like, "Let's try to order pizza
maybe when it's icy or when there's a snowstorm."
Or when you could earn a nice living
digging up the bodies of those no longer living.
They're transporting bodies in wheelbarrows,
throwing them over their shoulder.
They're putting 'em on horseback.
A well-preserved, recently dug up body would get you $700.
That is a lot more than most people would make in a month.
Or when dam workers risked it all
to make some damn good money.
They placed dynamite into that wall.
They light the fuse and swing away,
and do the process over and over all day for hours.
This used to be how American men were.
Get me a rope, a plank, and pay me seven bucks,
and I'll get that done for you.
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?
Some say the ultimate way to get rich quick
was the gold rush of the 1840s.
But a century later, Americans were in a frenzy
to get their hands on something else valuable,
something that, it turns out,
was a really bad thing to put your hands on.
In the late 1940s, there's this new resource
that everyone is talking about.
And it's just out there,
in the American West, waiting to be discovered.
If you can find it, you're gonna get rich quick.
And what is it?
It's uranium.
Now the US government's been relying
on imports of uranium from places like Canada
and the Belgian Congo.
But after the war, with an increase in nuclear testing,
all of a sudden the US needs a lot more uranium,
and they need it now.
So the federal government could build a big prospecting
and mining operation, but they do something else.
Instead, the Atomic Energy Commission
basically says to the American people,
"Get outside and find us some uranium."
The Commission starts running ads in magazines,
trying to say, "Hey, we will pay you good money
if you go mine this ore for us."
For every pound of uranium you find,
the government's gonna pay you $3.50,
or that's effectively $50 today.
If you can find a whole deposit of uranium,
there's a $10,000 bonus, equivalent to 150 grand today.
So people are motivated.
Do you need a special permit or license to do this?
No, you don't.
But the government did say,
"Hey, if you're looking, here's 350 million acres,
basically a quarter of the size of the continental US,
where you should go look for this stuff,
'cause we're pretty sure it's here."
It's an official government-backed treasure hunt,
and Americans jump right in.
Prospecting is really grueling work,
but some people make a fortune doing it.
There's this one man, Charles Steen,
who lived in this very modest shack in Utah.
In 1952, he stumbles upon one of the largest deposits ever.
It's worth $6 billion today.
By the 1950s, America has gone uranium crazy.
Even comedic superstar Lucille Ball
has an episode in one of her TV specials
where she becomes a uranium prospector.
Honey!
Honey, you did it!
I knew it!
You did it!
I knew I'd find uranium!
The idea of prospecting uranium
has become part of the pop culture.
By the late '60s,
people have brought the government so much uranium.
It's actually almost 350 million pounds,
which is twice the amount of steel weight
that's in the Golden Gate Bridge.
In exchange for this work,
the government has paid out $3 billion to citizens,
which is almost $35 billion in today's money.
That is more than NASA's current annual budget.
But there's this one minor difference between this
and the gold rush a century earlier, or silver, or even oil.
And that is that those things aren't radioactive.
This stuff is very, very hazardous.
And you've got all these people rushing out
and handling it without any protection at all.
Today uranium is handled very differently.
People are wearing, first of all, protective gear.
They're wearing gloves,
they're wearing hazardous material suits.
But the '50s are like this time of blissful ignorance
about radioactivity or any environmental hazard.
There's even this atomic industry film
where a guy is opening up a can of crushed uranium
and then getting it all over his fingers
like he's playing with sand at the beach.
But not surprisingly,
people working most closely with uranium,
prospectors, truckers, miners, they start getting sick.
As lung cancer and respiratory disease
ripple through uranium mining towns,
the evidence becomes impossible to ignore.
In 1974, the Atomic Energy Commission shuts down.
And later, Congress institutes
the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act,
providing billions for the people who got sick
and their families.
There are still people looking for
uranium today.
The big difference is the government is
not encouraging it,
nor are they incentivizing it.
And hopefully those people
are taking some amount of safety into account here.
Uranium hunters were encouraged to chase a fortune
and paid a steep price.
But decades earlier, there was another job
that offered great upward mobility,
straight up the side of a building.
In the early 1900s,
American cities are action-packed places.
As a result of the development of concrete,
we have skyscrapers.
The cities are getting taller, they're getting bigger,
they're thriving, and they're exciting.
Banks, hotels, businesses,
they're all competing for the public's attention.
And this gives rise to what we call ballyhoo,
these great spectacular events
that capture the public attention
all to draw attention to the name
on the front of the building.
So a new class of daredevils arises
in order to bring attention to these businesses,
by climbing up the side of buildings, for a fee,
with no safety equipment.
Sometimes these guys, by the way,
they just dressed like they were going to the office.
They would wear business shoes and a suit,
so it looked like
they were just crawling out of the building,
which is actually a pretty good hook.
Some of these climbers really understand
showmanship, so they'll often do various dramatic poses as they
climb, really milking the attention factor,
getting the crowd completely into it.
In general, if someone's doing something
that looks to be crazy,
where you feel that pumping in your heart
because you think it's dangerous,
you're gonna stand and look.
I would.
These climbers
are eventually given the nickname human flies
because of the way they seem to defy gravity
while clutching to the outside of the building.
This starts out as a handful of, like, promotional stunts,
but it starts to become a phenomenon
that spreads from city to city.
These climbers find that not only are businesses
eager to get it on it,
but it's actually fairly easy to get city approval.
If someone was climbing a building today,
they would have a security perimeter around the site.
Back then, that's not the case.
The spectators are encouraged
to gather around at the base of the building.
The famous human fly was George Polley.
And he was not only a great climber,
but he also was a great showman.
He would get halfway up and then pretend to fall.
And the crowd would .
And then he would just laugh and keep going.
He climbs a building in Massachusetts.
And it's so dangerous that some people can't watch it,
they hide their eyes,
'cause he's just hanging on by his fingertips.
But when he makes it to the top,
he rides his bicycle around the edge of the building
as a finale.
This was a profession.
They got paid like 200 bucks a climb,
which is what other people made in about a month.
So a guy could literally be like,
"Honey, I'll be back later,"
go to work, crawl up, catch 200 bucks.
Living the high life.
Crowds loved to watch these daredevils for hire
push their luck.
But sometimes that luck runs out.
In 1923, a human fly named Harry Young
climbs the 16-story Hotel Martinique in Manhattan
for a hundred dollar fee in order to promote a movie.
Throughout his climb, he pretends several times
to slip his foot just to create dramatic effect
and give the people a show.
At the 11th floor, he does another foot slip,
except this time it's not a gag.
His foot actually slips and he falls
off the building.
He hits a part of the building's facade
and then plummets down.
The policemen has to force a bunch of women off the sidewalk
to keep them from getting hit.
Young is killed pretty much instantly.
There are more fatal falls just like that one,
and officials start putting their foot down.
New York City becomes one of the first places
to crack down.
The police start denying permits.
Then the Great Depression hits
and advertising budgets dry up.
And eventually the profession of human fly
disappears forever.
If somebody does an event like this today,
it's under so much safety
that it really doesn't feel raw and exciting
the way that it must have felt to people a century ago.
That's something that's gone the way of the dodo.
Everyone wants to get to the top.
Human flies just took the direct route.
We've all seen signs on job sites
that say "X days without an accident."
Now imagine a job where they couldn't get past 19.
And that's not 19 without an accident.
I mean 19 without a death.
In the early 1930s, the Colorado River
is completely unpredictable.
Some years, it's completely arid and crops fail.
Other years, the snowfall is so intense
it washes away entire harvests
throughout Arizona and California
and kills townspeople.
The government decides to fix this problem
by going really big.
They set out to construct
a massive concrete wall 60 stories high.
Not only that,
they're gonna have this wall generate electricity,
which will feed millions of homes in the southwest.
This wall is the Hoover Dam.
Construction begins on the dam,
and the working conditions are tough.
People drown in the Colorado River,
they're hit by moving trucks, objects fall on them.
It's incredibly dangerous.
But the most treacherous job of all
is what's called a high scaler.
The high scaler's job
is to clear the canyon walls of any loose rock
so that the dam can be built onto smooth, stable bedrock.
So that means loading yourself up with gear
and then climbing down the canyon walls.
The only thing standing between these men
and an 800 foot drop is a single rope
and a whole lot of nerve.
Once they're down,
a jackhammer has to be lowered to them
to clear away loose rocks,
but they also have to drill holes into the wall.
And then they place dynamite into that wall.
They light the fuse and swing away at just the right time
so that the dynamite can explode and they don't get hurt.
And then they go and do the process
over and over all day for hours.
No safety, no anything.
Like, this used to be how American men were.
"You need to clip some of that?
Yeah, get me a rope, a plank, and pay me seven bucks,
and I'll get that done for you."
Could you imagine that today?
No way.
But they're not just getting the job done,
they're putting on a show.
Tourists drive from all over the place
to watch these men who, at this size and distance,
look like insects.
Journalists marvel at the three-ring circus
that is the Hoover Dam being built.
They have little contests with each other.
Some of them decide to push out from the wall
as far as they can on their rope.
They're daring each other to outdo one another.
And the fact that safety foreman are few and far between
means there's really no one there to tell them to stop.
But as construction moves along,
the glamour of being a high scaler begins to fade.
The work is nonstop.
They work eight hours a day, seven days a week,
all year long.
You're gonna get mentally tired,
and that's gonna lead to errors.
Fatigue makes it easy to lose your wits,
raising the chances that you won't anchor yourself properly,
plummeting 800 feet to your death.
Oh, and you can also get blown up by the dynamite
if you aren't careful.
By today's construction standards,
the final death toll is stunning.
96 deaths are officially accounted for
in the construction of the dam,
but some experts think that's actually an under count.
Regardless, it's a staggering amount of lives
and amounts to about one death every 19 days.
It's always easy to look back on times that have
gone by and judge them from a modern perspective.
And I think that's a mistake.
The dam had to get built for America.
They took pride in their work.
They were taking pride in their country.
There was a work ethic that just isn't really around today
in the same way.
It just goes to show that some careers
didn't come with a safety net.
And in other jobs, you just had to go with the flow,
even if that meant you were heading right toward the rapids.
In the late 19th century, America is absolutely
exploding in every possible way,
population-wise, industrialization.
And all of those things lead to a huge demand for wood.
And the biggest concentration of lumber
is in the Upper Midwest,
where there's just vast, seemingly inexhaustible forests.
Of course cutting down the trees
is only half the equation.
There's still this small matter
of moving them across the country.
Railroads haven't gotten there yet.
They don't have roads.
But rivers are a great path.
Every winter crews cut down millions of trees,
stack them along the sides of the rivers.
In the spring, when the river opens up,
they dump these logs into the river
and just float them downstream.
But this lumber
can't be left to just float on its own.
Even one stuck log can stop the flow,
shutting down mills a hundred miles away.
That's where these log drivers come in,
or, as they like to call themselves, river pigs.
So these river pigs are basically like lumberjacks
wearing spiked boots.
They've got this big lever called a peavey.
And the idea is that when they see logs stuck together,
they'll jam it in there, they'll pry them apart,
and they keep the logs moving going down the river,
which also means they're going down the river.
These guys have to be strong enough
to actually handle the lumber,
but they also have to be nimble and agile enough
to balance on the logs and hop from log to log
as these logs are spinning in the water.
River pigs are some of the highest paid men
in the industry.
The notoriety of the river pigs is for real.
I mean, people will come from miles and miles
just to watch them do their job.
If I told you that there's a bunch of dudes
who can ride logs down a river,
I think even in the 21st century you kind of wanna watch.
I wanna watch it right now.
Some of them do headstands, they do somersaults,
they jump from log to log.
They're deeply, deeply badass.
If you're a kid at this time,
you know there's not Evel Knievel yet.
These guys are daredevils.
But rolling on the river
is not all fortune and glory.
It sounds exciting, but it's actually
quite grueling.
These log drives can last for weeks at a time.
People are working maybe 16 hours a day.
You know, the river doesn't stop, the logs don't stop.
The living conditions are not great,
even the kitchen floats downstream along with you.
And everything is just wet all the time,
so there's mold and vermin everywhere.
But that's nothing compared
to the real risks these men are facing.
They're running around on undulating logs all day.
One false step and you can fall in.
The logs are heavy.
They can weigh up to 4,000 pounds.
So you might get crushed between them
or you might get trapped beneath them in the freezing water.
There's a really high chance that if you go
under, you might never be seen again.
Now keep in mind this is pre-OSHA.
Like, people don't know
about workplace health standards at all.
So it's really just like,
"Oh, yeah, did John show up for lunch?
I guess he's still alive.
Cool, good job."
Like, that was it.
Eventually the end comes for river pigs,
but not because it's too dangerous.
Road and automotive technology develops
and trucks become the primary way to haul logs.
And many of the old growth forest are cut down.
With all these changes,
the river pig as an occupation is gone,
and with it, the heroism, the bravado, the risk taking,
and the cool factor that was associated with them.
Sometimes if you wanna make a living,
you gotta be willing to go in over your head.
Some jobs aren't for everyone,
which you may know if you've ever worked a night shift.
That was certainly true in the old days
when one occupation gave the dead of night
a whole new meaning.
By the early 1800s, medicine is really becoming a
field in a more official sense.
And some of the innovations
that they come up with at that time
are things we still use today.
Take the stethoscope, anesthesia.
This explosion in medical research
leads to more people enrolling in medical schools.
Now, the medical schools
can't provide effective instruction without cadavers.
At this period, life expectancy is up,
executions are down.
All of that means that there are fewer bodies
available for study.
Medical schools turn to grave robbers,
or the way cooler name, resurrection men.
Resurrection men work in crews
with a simple business model: dig up bodies,
sell them to medical schools, collect the cash.
These crews are extremely professional.
They're not just going and digging up corpses,
they're getting the freshest bodies as quickly as possible.
But it's not like the old like Frankenstein
where they were digging the bodies
and there's a big pile of dirt.
These guys wanted to be efficient.
So what they did was they dug like a strip
at the top of the grave six feet down,
broke through to the coffin, put hooks under the armpits,
and then hoisted them right up in the grave.
I mean, they were in and out of that cemetery
25 minutes tops.
And then they would try to fill it in
and even put the flowers back on
so that nobody would catch 'em.
These grave robbers
have to get these bodies from the grave site
to the medical school,
and they have all sorts of ways of doing that.
They're transporting bodies in wheelbarrows.
They're putting them in sacks
and throwing them over their shoulder.
They're putting 'em on horseback.
Sometimes they would just dress them up,
put a big coat on 'em, put a hat on 'em,
and put 'em next to him in a wagon,
and just start clapping through the city.
And everybody just thinks, "Oh, his buddy's drunk."
Meanwhile, he's traipsing around town with a corpse.
It's like "Weekend at Bernie's."
This is a very lucrative business.
A well-preserved, recently dug up body in 1800
would get you $25.
That's $700 in today's money.
That is a lot more than most people would make in a month,
certainly more than the guy
who dug that grave to begin with.
But while resurrection men are busy digging,
grieving families decide to fight back with a little help.
Inventors realized
that there's real possibility here for innovation.
And so they invent some accessories, if you will,
to make these graves more secure.
And those are booby traps.
One invented in the 1870s is called the
coffin torpedo.
It's actually just a loaded shotgun
cradled around the deceased's arms
that when the coffin lid opens, bam, goodbye, grave robber.
Other coffin booby traps are right in the soil,
like almost a landmine.
So if you dug too close to the body,
they would explode and kill you too.
I guess that's why resurrection men
worked in teams.
'Cause if somebody went down in the field,
hey, that's an easy night of work.
But the money is too good,
so it doesn't stop until someone really snatches
the wrong body.
In 1878 in Ohio,
there's a congressman, John Scott Harrison,
whose body is snatched from his grave.
Not only is he a congressman,
he is the son of former president
William Henry Harrison,
and the father of future president Benjamin Harrison.
Now a very powerful family has fallen victim
to the resurrection men and they're very angry about it.
Soon after, it becomes illegal,
and now there are legal pipelines
for obtaining cadavers,
through unidentified bodies
that they get from hospitals,
prisons, and almshouses.
It's the end of an era,
no more corpses riding shotgun
on a horse and carriage through the streets,
which is kind of something I'd actually like to see.
No more "Weekend at Bernie's" shenanigans.
Another promising trade just dries up.
Back then, the dead were just another way
to make a living.
But if you think that was unpleasant,
there was another 19th century job that truly stank.
In the late 1800s,
American cities' populations are booming.
But a lot of people also means a lot of something
that nobody wants to deal with, human waste.
Most people that could not afford indoor plumbing
used what we would call an outhouse.
It's sort of a cabin with a wooden plank in it to be a seat,
it's got a hole in it,
and it goes to a pit called the privy.
How do cities deal with getting rid of all this waste?
Well, they didn't use pipes.
They used people.
There is a job known as the night soil crew.
At night, when everyone's asleep,
the crew comes out with their carts and their dippers
and they scoop out the human waste,
so when everybody wakes up in the morning,
they can start all over refilling the latrines.
The job is vital for cities to function,
but for the workers, it's the pits.
A professional would go to where the tank is
and they would ladle the human waste
into a bucket.
And then they would haul it away bucket by bucket.
However, larger residences or tenement blocks
might have a tank that was 20 feet deep,
which means that a ladder would have to go into the tank.
A human being would go down that ladder
and haul up months and months of excrement
one bucket at a time.
You know, the one bright spot
is these guys got paid pretty well.
They weren't the richest dudes.
They would also get a bottle of gin,
which they needed to be drunk to do the job.
And down on the foul smelling muck,
invisible dangers lurk.
These privy vaults are deep and unventilated,
and that means that the gases from the human waste build up.
We're talking poisonous gases like methane,
hydrogen sulfide.
So if a human being is in there
and these poisonous gases have displaced the oxygen,
they could pass out.
And what happens next?
They fall into the waste and drown,
in human waste.
What a way to go.
But wait, it gets worse.
Hazardous gases can also cause explosions in the pits.
And there's this huge risk of disease and infection
just from being around human waste all the time.
Toxic gases, explosions, drowning in waste;
eventually governments get the hint.
By the 1890s, New York and Brooklyn
actually create a sewage system.
There's like pipes in the ground.
So there is finally a place for all of this,
you know, prodigious poop to go.
History flushes away the privy, the outhouse,
and the livelihoods of the night soil workers.
But we forever are grateful for their service,
for their selflessness,
and for truly answering the call of duty.
So indoor plumbing eventually put the night soil men
out of business.
I've gotta think it was partially a relief.
It has never been easier to keep up with current events.
With a swipe of a finger,
your phone brings you up on the latest.
But there was a time when delivering the news
was practically an extreme sport.
In the 1950s, every morning around 5:00 AM,
you hear the whirr of a bicycle chain,
and thump after thump
as something lands on neighborhood porches.
Moving from block to block is a kid with a bike
and a bag of newspapers,
a worker as common as any mailman,
a paperboy.
And even though it means waking up before dawn,
in those days, it's a job lots of kids want.
As a former paperboy, I have to tell you,
there is something to being like,
"Hey, man, I have responsibility.
Like, I am a business person."
I was 10 years old when I started being a paperboy.
And you're getting paid real money,
usually between 3 and $7 a week,
which doesn't sound like much,
but in today's money, that's about 40 to a hundred dollars.
That makes you the man.
I was walking around like making it rain on people.
"Hey, you want some pizza?
I'm getting you some pizza.
You want a comic book?
I got it."
You were the most popular kid in the neighborhood.
Paperboy isn't just a job,
it's an American institution.
By 1950, a half a million American kids
are running a paper route.
By 1980, it's over a million.
The paperboy becomes iconic,
becomes as American as baseball and apple pie.
They're on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.
They're on TV shows like "Leave It to Beaver."
But is the job as romantic as we remember?
I have memories of terrible weather conditions
and going out in the winter, in the rain.
And you had a responsibility
to get this product to the customer.
They're almost like the US Mail,
rain, sleet, hail, those papers gotta get out,
and you're in a bike, baby,
with a 50-pound bag slung over your back,
and you're in a snowstorm.
And you know if you don't get it to Mrs. Crabapple's house,
she's gonna scream at you the next time you're there.
Not only do you have a weather,
not only do you have a 50-pound bag,
you also have people driving to work in the morning,
bleary-eyed, not paying attention to the road.
Remember, there's not a lot of light in those days.
It's kind of pitch black.
A kid on a bike is hard for drivers to see.
And these boys are not wearing helmets.
There are no bicycle helmets for all intents and purposes.
So you can get hit by a car and suffer tremendous injury.
So you get a lot of kids with broken bones,
a lot of concussions,
and the government classifies these workers
as independent contractors.
That's how they get around child labor laws.
They're working every day with none of the protections
that are afforded to working people.
No helmet, no benefits,
and often seemingly no end to the route.
Suburban sprawl is everywhere by the late 1960s.
And a route that used to be just a few blocks
suddenly covers miles of looping streets
in these developments, sometimes even across highways.
So no longer is it a
45-minute job early in the morning,
it's a much bigger job that is sort of outpacing
what a typical paperboy might be able to do.
The paperboy kind of falls by the wayside,
to be replaced by an adult in an automobile.
So we lost the paperboy.
You lost the work ethic part of it.
You lost the independence of a kid.
What is better than being on your bike,
riding through, and your friends would come with you,
and you deliver papers?
I mean, you can't even get kids out of the house anymore,
let alone on their own doing business.
The paper route proved a kid with a bike
could make serious money,
but what about the teenager with a car
and a job that rewarded them for driving like a maniac?
In the 1960s,
the idea of getting pizza delivered to your home
is an alien concept to most of America.
Pizza is looked at as a dine-in restaurant kind of food.
In Michigan, a scrappy little pizza chain
is born in the ashes of a restaurant called Dominic's,
and it becomes Domino's.
And in 1979, they create a delivery campaign
that is nothing short of revolutionary.
Your pizza will arrive in 30 minutes or it's free.
One call from you
sets Domino's Pizza in motion.
As you can imagine, people went nuts.
If it's not delivered in 30 minutes, it's free?
Like, this was revolutionary.
I remember when they came out with this guarantee,
it was exciting.
You're like, okay, you've ordered, and it is 6:05.
And then if they show up at 6:20,
you're like, "Oh, damn it, we have to pay for this."
On the strength of the new campaign, sales soar,
and Domino's grows rapidly in the '80s.
But delivering everywhere in 30 minutes
requires some outside-the-box driving.
Each store has to make and box the pizza in 10 minutes,
leaving 20 minutes to get to your location.
And that's regardless of your address.
You may be at the complete edge of the delivery zone.
Drivers, who are mostly teenagers and college kids,
they're running red lights, speeding through intersections,
driving in weather they should not be driving in,
anything to make this delivery.
Some people are rooting against the delivery guy.
They want them to fail.
They deliberately give the driver wrong directions.
They don't answer the door right away.
If you had a Domino's in your area,
you were definitely like, "Let's try to order a pizza
maybe when it's icy or when there's a snowstorm."
It's like trying to game out how you can make sure
it was gonna take them 30 minutes.
Domino's does what it can to mitigate these hazards.
The franchisee manual says, in all caps,
fast delivery does not come
from speeding or reckless driving.
I think back then, if I had been old enough,
I would've been a Domino's delivery driver.
I would've loved it.
That would've just been another notch to the racing resume.
If they can't meet that 30 minute window,
that location has to eat the cost.
In terms of a marketing ploy, it's brilliant.
But in terms of running a business,
it is a wildly unforgiving proposition.
By 1989, there are over 20 delivery fatalities
nationwide.
And in St. Louis, a $79 million award
is given to a woman who was injured
by a driver running a red light.
So the company, they can't continue the policy.
Founder Tom Monaghan, he calls a press conference
and lets everyone know the 30-minute guarantee
has come to an end.
Now, today, globally, Domino's is still the dominant
name when it comes to pizza delivery.
It is still getting to you pretty quickly,
but it's getting to you safely
and it's keeping the public safe.
But even though it got out of control,
that 30-minute guarantee made pizza delivery
like combat sport.
It was exciting.
Every time you ordered a pizza,
something magical could happen.
So the next time you order delivery from an app,
remember the trailblazing pizza drivers of the 1980s.
In the era of silent films,
Hollywood knew that thrilling visuals were everything.
But decades before CGI,
the danger wasn't just part of the story,
it was part of the job.
In the 1920s, Americans have become obsessed
with Hollywood movies.
There are now 20,000 movie theaters in the country.
That has doubled the amount of public high schools.
The studios in Hollywood, they have one
important job, and that is they have to feed that beast.
They have to churn out movies.
And to do that, they need actors.
Aspiring actors flock to Los Angeles,
and what they find is an industry
that prizes spectacle above all else.
This is the silent film era.
There's no dialogue.
So to draw an audience, films have to be larger than life.
That means a lot of stunts.
Today, before any action-packed scene happens,
all these experts weigh in on how to make a scene safe.
And typically there is a trained stunt man
to step in for the actor to do it.
Back then, movie makers really have to put actors
in these real situations.
They could be dangling from cliffs or in a fire,
jumping from a train.
And there's no CGI at this time, so you can't fake anything.
It is as dangerous as it gets.
In the 1920s, safety standards effectively
did not exist.
Producers and directors are sort of making things up
as they go along.
They're just like,
"No, someone's gotta jump off this moving horse.
It's gonna be you."
Plain and simple.
In 1928, "Steamboat Bill Jr,"
one of the most iconic film scenes of all time,
Buster Keaton stands in front of a two-story house
whose front is blown over by a cyclone,
and it topples perfectly over,
slotting him through an open window unscathed.
But that was the real front of a building
falling over the real Buster Keaton.
No one had ever seen anything like it before.
I mean, they only had one shot at it.
And it worked.
But playing fast and loose with stunts
doesn't always have a Hollywood ending.
In 1925, during the filming of the movie "Ben-Hur,"
a wheel came off one of the chariots
and the driver was killed.
In 1928, during the filming of "Noah's Ark,"
600,000 gallons of water were released
and three extras are drowned.
Between 1925 and 1930, there are 10,000 incidents
of people being injured on movie sets.
There are actually 55 deaths.
If there's an accident on a set,
it's just like,
"Okay, well, we're gonna need a different person to do that.
Let's move on, all right?"
The show must go on.
Even after the silent era,
Hollywood keeps playing with fire.
In "The Wizard of Oz," 1939,
Margaret Hamilton,
who's playing the Wicked Witch of the West,
she's got her famous line where she says,
"I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too."
And then she's supposed to spin around in a puff of smoke,
disappear, and then there's an explosion.
The crew accidentally sets off the explosions
before she's out of harm's way,
and her costume catches on fire.
To make matters worse, her iconic green makeup is toxic.
If it burns, it will melt to her skin.
So crew members frantically try to, one, put out the flames,
and two, scrub her of the makeup
so she doesn't get further injured.
She does survive, but walks away with third degree burns.
Over the decades,
Hollywood just starts to take safety more seriously.
Accidents still occur, injuries, even some deaths,
but they are far less common.
Some of the scenes that Buster Keaton shot
and some of these guys shot,
a hundred years later, they're still amazing
and captivating to watch because it's all real.
I can tell you, every actor today
owes something to those early pioneers.
They filmed in black and white
and they went home black and blue.
Did you know that there was a time
when giving blood wasn't a donation,
it was a paycheck.
And while it sounded like easy money,
it could take a lot out of you.
Innovation often comes out of war.
And during World War II, blood transfusions are used
in a widespread way for the first time.
After the war ends,
blood transfusions then become a common medical procedure
used on civilians.
But here's the problem.
Blood transfusions only work if somebody donates blood.
And after the war ends,
people are way less motivated to donate,
and so there's just a lot less available.
The supply is not meeting the demand.
So the solution is simple, throw money at the problem.
Across the country, commercial blood banks
and clinics open up, offering cash for a pint.
A man might make a quick $5 just by rolling up his sleeve,
maybe even 10.
That's $145 in today's money for something that your body
just automatically keeps making.
How easy is that?
And thus is born a new job
called the professional blood donor.
If I'm getting paid $150 for my blood, I would take it,
you know what I mean?
Like, I can see why people jumped on this bandwagon.
And once the cash starts flowing,
so does the blood.
There are some rules about how often you can donate,
but donors try to slip under the radar
by going to different clinics to keep the cash rolling in.
And even when they get busted,
some blood banks like to look the other way
to keep the supply flowing.
There's some pro donors that end up going every week,
sometimes even every few days,
because in their mind it's like, what's the problem?
My body's gonna make more.
Donating blood multiple times a week,
it's terrible for your body.
Modern guidelines say wait at least eight weeks
in between blood donations.
So if you're giving blood multiple times a week,
even once a week,
you can imagine you're like a video game character
and your health meter
just keeps running lower and lower and lower.
Low blood supply means low iron,
and that means constant fatigue.
So you've got donors
who are sometimes so weak that they're fainting
when they go to give more blood.
But there's also some really weird symptoms that happen,
like restless leg syndrome,
or really brittle nails, or the urge to eat ice.
Isn't that weird?
People with low iron have pica,
and people with pica crave weird things like dirt.
So they will end up going into their own backyards
and just grabbing a handful of dirt and just eating it.
And they know it's crazy, but their body is craving it.
The other big issue is the lack of sterilization.
I mean, today, we have disposable needles,
disposable tubes, disposable bags.
Anything associated with blood is like a one-time use.
But in the '50s, a lot of the gear is getting reused.
And so you've got glass, you've got rubber,
and they get washed, but not always perfectly.
And if it doesn't get properly sterilized,
there's just this massive risk of infection.
But at least the donors are cashing in
on bleeding themselves dry.
But what's in it for the blood recipients
are some things they didn't sign up for.
It's important to be able to screen this blood
to make sure that you are not unintentionally giving
a disease to the person who's already in a bad place
and needs a blood transfusion.
But the major problem is in the '50s and '60s,
we can't test for a lot of these diseases.
At this time, there's only one that we can test for,
which is syphilis.
So that's good.
But what about all the other things?
Doctors know there's risk of other diseases,
like hepatitis, but they don't have tests for them.
So all they can do is just ask the donor,
"Hey, do you have hepatitis?"
And hope that they know and tell you the truth.
They're not gonna say, "Yes, I have this thing.
Don't take my blood.
Don't give me money."
In the '50s and '60s, there's about a 17% chance
that you will transmit hepatitis B
to somebody who greatly needs that blood.
By the late 1960s, it's too hard to ignore
that this blood trade is risky business,
so they decide to stop the bleeding.
The federal government steps up in 1972.
The FDA puts much more restrictive regulations
on blood banks.
It mandates more thorough testing for disease.
It limits the amount people can donate.
Today, that's about every 56 days, about six times a year.
And most importantly, a new government policy
prohibits paying for whole blood.
In other words, no more blood money.
Sure, the old ways to make a buck
were a little unorthodox.
Whether you were dangling off a skyscraper,
riding logs through the rapids,
or draining your veins for cash,
the math was always the same.
The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.
And maybe that's what made our hazardous history
worth every penny.