Behind every bowling lane, in a shallow trench called the pit, a boy crouched in the half-dark and waited for the thunder. When the ball struck, ten maple pins exploded toward him at speeds that could break a shin or split a lip. His job was to leap clear, then leap back: clear the fallen pins (the deadwood), roll the ball into the return gutter, and reset the survivors or, between frames, drop a fresh rack of ten into a spotting jig so each pin stood on its painted spot. Then he climbed up on his perch and waited for the next ball. A fast boy could keep two lanes going at once.
The work was piecework, paid by the line (a single game), and the pay was pennies. The boys who did it were usually that, boys, working evenings and weekends after school, and the alleys that hired them were frequently rough, smoky, late-night places. The pinsetter, or pinboy, or pinspotter, was the human bottleneck at the heart of bowling: no matter how popular the game became, a house could only run as many lanes as it had boys willing to sit in the pit.
That bottleneck is what an automatic machine finally broke. Gottfried (Fred) Schmidt, an engineer, built a working mechanical pinsetter in the 1930s; his patent was assigned to and developed by American Machine and Foundry (AMF), which demonstrated prototypes in 1946 and shipped its first commercial Pinspotters in 1952. Brunswick followed in 1956. Within a decade the machine had not only replaced the pinboy but unleashed bowling’s enormous postwar boom, because a house was no longer limited by how many boys it could keep in the pit.
By the late 1950s and into the 1960s the pinboy was a memory in nearly every American tenpin house. The trade survives today only at the margins: a handful of historic alleys and duckpin houses, especially in the Northeast, that still pay a person to sit behind the lanes and set the pins by hand, more as living heritage than as economics.
For more than two centuries, a computer was a person. The word named a job, not a machine: someone who computed, who sat with paper, pen, tables of logarithms, and later a mechanical calculator, and ground through the arithmetic that astronomy, navigation, ballistics, and engineering demanded. The job was old by the 1700s, when nations needed star tables to find longitude at sea, and it was still being advertised in the 1950s, when the work was firing artillery and launching rockets.
The great projects ran on human computers organized like factories. Nevil Maskelyne’s Nautical Almanac, first issued for 1767, was calculated by a dispersed network of computers and comparers working from their homes across England. After the French Revolution, Gaspard de Prony organized hundreds of workers into a three-tier hierarchy to grind out vast logarithmic and trigonometric tables, boasting that he could manufacture logarithms as one manufactures pins. The model was division of labor applied to arithmetic.
Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the role was steadily feminized. At the Harvard College Observatory from the 1880s, Edward Pickering hired a corps of women, the Harvard Computers, to classify stars from photographic plates; among them Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, and Henrietta Swan Leavitt made discoveries that reshaped astronomy. During the Second World War, women computed artillery firing tables at Aberdeen, and six of them went on to program ENIAC. At NACA and NASA, the West Area Computers, including Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, did the mathematics of flight and spaceflight.
The electronic computer, built in part to do exactly this work, took both the work and the name. ENIAC was completed in 1945; through the late 1950s and 1960s, machines like IBM’s mainframes absorbed the calculation. By around 1970 the human computer as a job had effectively ended, but unlike most vanished trades the people did not simply disappear. Many became programmers, mathematicians, and engineers; the title they had held migrated to the machine that replaced them, which is why we still call it a computer.
Before a telephone call could reach anyone, a person had to make the connection. At the manual exchange, an operator sat before a tall cord board, a wall of jacks each wired to a subscriber’s line, answered the small falling signal of an incoming call with the words Number, please, and physically joined caller to called by plugging a pair of cords into the right two jacks. For most of the telephone’s first century, a phone call was a handshake between two strangers, brokered by a third person you never saw.
The first operators, in the late 1870s, were teenage boys carried over from the telegraph offices, and they were a disaster: impatient, profane, and prone to pranks. On September 1, 1878, the Telephone Dispatch Company in Boston hired Emma Nutt, the world’s first female telephone operator; her calm voice and manner were such a success that within a few years operating became overwhelmingly a women’s occupation, and the switchboard became one of the largest employers of young women in the industrial world.
The machine that would end the job was patented almost as early as the job itself. In 1891 Almon Strowger, a Kansas City undertaker convinced that operators were steering his customers to a rival, patented an automatic telephone exchange, the girl-less, cuss-less telephone, that let a caller dial a number directly and be connected by machinery. Through the twentieth century, automatic dial exchanges and direct dialing spread across the network, and the manual switchboard slowly retreated from the cities to the towns to the smallest rural hamlets.
The retreat ended in the 1980s. As the last small manual exchanges in the United States were cut over to automatic dial, the cord board fell silent town by town. The most celebrated finale came in Bryant Pond, Maine, where the country’s last hand-crank, manually switched telephone system, run from the operators’ living room, was disconnected on October 11, 1983. With it, the switchboard operator as a connector of ordinary local calls passed into history.
For roughly a century, the fastest way to move a thought across a continent was to convert it into clicks. The telegraph operator sat at a desk between a brass key and a sounder, translating language into the dots and dashes of Morse code and back again, and in doing so became the human switchboard of the industrial age. On 24 May 1844 Samuel Morse tapped out “What hath God wrought” from the U.S. Capitol to Baltimore, and within a single generation a web of copper wire had been thrown across America, Britain, and Europe, with a submarine cable spanning the Atlantic by 1866. Historians have called the result the “Victorian Internet”: a real-time network that compressed weeks of distance into minutes.
The people who ran it were a distinct and proud caste. A good operator could send and receive 30 to 40 words a minute, the best far more, and the truly skilled “read” incoming code by ear alone, transcribing a steady stream of clicks into longhand without looking. The work demanded literacy, concentration, and a near-musical sensitivity to rhythm, and it rewarded those qualities regardless of who possessed them. Telegraphy was unusually merit-based for the 19th century: women worked the wires in large numbers, and in the United States Black operators found a foothold in a respectable, skilled trade at a time when few others were open to them.
The whole apparatus of modern commerce came to lean on these operators. Railroads dispatched trains and prevented collisions by wire; the Associated Press and other agencies built journalism around the telegraph; stock and commodity markets quoted prices that the ticker, a specialized telegraph, printed in real time. Around the key grew a culture all its own, a community of “lightning slingers” who recognized one another by the personal rhythm of their sending, swapped gossip down the line during quiet hours, and sometimes courted and married people they had never met in person, conducting whole romances in code.
What ended them was not one machine but a sequence of them. The telephone let people speak directly; the teleprinter and teletype let a typewriter keyboard generate the signal, so that operators no longer needed to know Morse at all; telex, the facsimile, and finally the internet carried messages cheaper and faster than any human hand could tap. Western Union sent its last commercial telegram in the United States in 2006, and India’s state telegraph, one of the very last in the world, fell silent in 2013. The sound of the sounder, once the heartbeat of global communication, became a museum exhibit.
Every spring, when the ice broke and the rivers ran high with snowmelt, the log drivers went to work. Through the winter, lumber crews had felled timber and stacked it on frozen riverbanks and lake ice; at ice-out, that winter’s cut was tumbled into the swollen current and sent downstream to the sawmills. The drivers, known across the trade as river drivers, river pigs or log drivers, rode and herded the moving timber, balancing on rolling logs in spiked boots, prodding strays back into the current, and breaking up the jams that could halt a whole river’s worth of wood.
It was the cheapest way to move timber in a country with more rivers than roads. From the great pineries of Maine to the Great Lakes states and the Pacific Northwest, and along Canadian rivers such as the Ottawa, the spring drive was the link between the winter woods and the mill. Drivers worked with the peavey, the hinged cant hook with a spike that a Maine blacksmith named Joseph Peavey perfected in the 1850s, and with pike poles and flat-bottomed bateaux, building and blowing splash dams to flush logs down streams too small to float them otherwise.
The work was beautiful to watch and lethal to do. Breaking a key log in a jam could release thousands of tons of timber in an instant, and a man who slipped between the logs was crushed or drowned before he could be reached. More rivermen died in capsized bateaux than any other way, and those who drowned were sometimes remembered by their hobnailed boots hung on a tree by the river where they were lost. Around this danger grew a whole folklore, from the tall tales of Paul Bunyan to Canada’s beloved animated short “The Log Driver’s Waltz.”
The drives ended when something better came along: first logging railroads, then, decisively, trucks and improved roads, which moved timber year-round on a controllable schedule instead of waiting on the spring freshet. Mounting evidence of environmental damage, scoured riverbeds, bark and sawdust smothering the bottom, and fish kills, turned public and legal opinion against the practice. The last major log drive in the United States ran down Maine’s Kennebec River in 1976, the year a state ban took effect, and with it the river driver passed out of working life into legend.