I was researching some razors to put up for sale and was reminded of a sad story I saw on James Bingham’s Hawley entry:
He was interviewed by a government commission on child labour, when he stated that when he was ‘first in the trade the average age of razor grinders at death was 34’. He said that exhaust fans had improved matters, so that ‘we have some men of good age. The effect of the work depends very much on the temperance of the workers’
…we really don’t fully appreciate the labour standards we have, wow.
Wow. I wonder what made it so unhealthy. This is brutal 😞
@walden@sub.wetshaving.social had a good guess with the metal dust. Maybe lead if they’re making wedges there as well or who knows what randomly toxic stuff they were using at that point to dress the leather in stropping wheels and whatever other process they had. Seems lung related somehow though since fans made the difference. I did actually try searching archive.org for that “Fourth Report of the Children’s Employment Commission” back before it got hacked but wasn’t able to find anything.
Seems lung related somehow though since fans made the difference.
That was my thought as well. Metal dust doesn’t get into the lungs easily since it’s heavy. I wonder if they were actually running combustion engines (presumably steam engines given the time) indoors?
I agree about the combustion engines. Could have been coal-fired steam also.
Metal dust doesn’t get into the lungs easily since it’s heavy
When I first started using belt sanders and sharpening wheels to sharpen knives, I noticed metal dust everywhere. Because I like to clean up at the end of the day, I found films of it that I could not see. Since it was obviously airborne, I chose to assume that it could be a problem. A water mist helped with the belt sanders and abrasive wheels, but was a disaster for a paper sharpening wheel. The easy solution was strategically located magnetic metal plates since most knife steels are martensitic.
That certainly doesn’t sound super healthy! And I remembered another one: I think at one point molten lead was used for hardening steel? Bet that has some lovely fumes too.
And, lead was used as material for bushings in rotating machinery in those days too.
But … the work those guys did was amazing. So much style and attention to detail was put into those razors. Far too few people get to appreciate them.
Oof ya I bet there was a lot of CO poisoning before we understood that. Maybe from forges for hardening?
Probably that too 😬
Wow, just because of all the metal dust?
Say, what would you think about hiding the Straight Razor community and taking all the action to the main Wetshaving community? There are 7x as many subscribers, and since we’re so small anyway I wonder if it makes sense to have different communities for different niches.
I would be sad as I enjoy this little corner of the server. If you look at the front of this sub it’s a well curated (ha I’m biased) collection of interesting tidbits on this topic of some fascination to me and I feel like I’m building on something when I post to it. Whereas if I put it on the main page it’s there for a bit then it vanished into the sea of daily and misc threads. And I also find it gratifying that at least a couple of others have gotten the spirit of it and posted things that fit right in.
Doesn’t bother me at all that it operates on a scale of weeks and months and this feels more fun than a blog though I suppose it’s verging on one. I think it’s fairly discoverable too because you’ll see these posts when you’re viewing the local feed and most who are interested in the sort of thing that’s here will have subscribed. This checks out since the main sub has 11 users/day, 36/week and yet this post from 7 hours ago already has 10 points.
So I don’t know about varied subs in general but I feel attached to this one.
Great points!
