Yesterday, I found a thought-provoking photo series on MSN showing professions that no longer exist. They call it “Extinct Jobs.” When I was in high school, my father had a colleague who liked to photograph scenes in New York City that were likely to soon vanish.  It is a worthwhile endeavor, and this is an example of such work, albeit not by a single person.  With regards to our own times it is truly amazing how fast things have changed.  I suspect that we would not have predicted witnessing such rapid technological and indeed, sociological change in our lifetimes.

As for this series there are a number that catch my eye and mind in particular.  We have, of course, the telephone operator.  Try to reach a living person today.  But there are quainter(?) lost professions. In this context, I think that quainter means more antiquated and beyond the common memory.  So how about the “Knocker-up” of 1920’s London.  No it doesn’t mean that.  The knocker up was a man whose job it was to carry a long stick and knock on the windows of people who had to get up early.  He was a human alarm clock. Then there is the “rat catcher,” whose job it was to catch and kill rats in English train stations.  The image was taken on November 7, 1939.  But the image that seems most distant and raises the hairs on the back of my neck is the “London gas-lamp lighter.”  The image is from 1935.  But what it evokes, in the cobwebs of my mind, is almost exactly exactly a century old (August 3, 1914).  On the eve of World War I, Sir Edward Grey, British foreign secretary, is said to have remarked that “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”  There is some controversy as to whether Sir Grey actually said this.  However, both this series of photographs and those words emphasize a profound truth: that the events of human history can offer up profound change.