Myth suggests that Victorians were highly moralistic, sober, earnest and straight-laced. Yet, a cache of recently unearthed posters shows that those living during the mid-1830s until the turn of the century had other things in mind. Mesmerism was quite the rage, apparently. Oh, what would her majesty, Queen Victoria, have thought.
See more of these curious posters here.
Image: Poster showing a Victorian hypnotist at work on a group of subjects. Courtesy: Library of Congress.
Just over a hundred years ago, at the turn of the 19th century, Jean-Marc Côté and some of his fellow French artists were commissioned to imagine what the world would look like in 2000. Their colorful sketches and paintings portrayed some interesting inventions, though all seem to be grounded in familiar principles and incremental innovations — mechanical helpers, ubiquitous propellers and wings. Interestingly, none of these artist-futurists imagined a world beyond Victorian dress, gender inequality and wars. But these are gems nonetheless.
Some of their works found their way into cigar boxes and cigarette cases, others were exhibited at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. My three favorites: a Tailor of the Latest Fashion, the Aero-cab Station and the Whale Bus. See the full complement of these remarkable futuristic visions at the Public Domain Review, and check out the House Rolling Through the Countryside and At School.
I suspect our contemporary futurists — born in the late 20th or early 21st-century — will fall prey to the same narrow visions when asked to sketch our planet in 3000. But despite the undoubted wealth of new gadgets and gizmos a thousand years from now the challenge would be to see if their imagined worlds might be at peace and with equality for all.
Images courtesy of the Public Domain Review, a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Public Domain.
Many of us complain about the daily stresses from our jobs and our bosses, even our coworkers. We even bemoan the morning commute and the work we increasingly bring back home to complete in the evening. Many of us can be heard to say, “this job is killing me!”. Metaphorically, of course.
Well, researchers at Stanford and Harvard now find that in some cases your job is actually, quite literally, killing you. This may seem self-evident, but the data shows that workers with less education are significantly more likely to be employed in jobs that are more stressful and dangerous, and have less healthy workplace practices. This, in turn, leads to a significantly lower average life span than that for those with higher educational attainment. Researchers measured typical employment-related stressors such as: unemployment, layoffs, absence of employer subsidized health insurance, shift work, long working hours, job insecurity and work-family conflict. The less education a worker has, the more likely that she or he will suffer a greater burden from one or more of these stressors.
Looks like we’re gradually reverting to well-tested principles of Victorian worker exploitation. Check out more details from the study here.
From Washington Post:
People often like to groan about how their job is “killing” them. Tragically, for some groups of people in the U.S., that statement appears to be true.
A new study by researchers at Harvard and Stanford has quantified just how much a stressful workplace may be shaving off of Americans’ life spans. It suggests that the amount of life lost to stress varies significantly for people of different races, educational levels and genders, and ranges up to nearly three years of life lost for some groups.
Past research has shown an incredible variation in life expectancy around the United States, depending on who you are and where you live. Mapping life expectancy around the nation by both county of residence and race, you can see that people in some parts of the U.S. live as many as 33 years longer on average than people in other parts of the country, the researchers say.
Those gaps appear to be getting worse, as the wealthy extend their life spans and other groups are stagnant. One study found that men and women with fewer than 12 years of education had life expectancies that were still on par with most adults in the 1950s and 1960s — suggesting the economic gains of the last few decades have gone mostly to more educated people. The financial crisis and subsequent recession, which put many people in economic jeopardy, may have worsened this effect.
There are lots of reasons that people with lower incomes and educations tend to have lower life expectancies: differences in access to health care, in exposure to air and water pollution, in nutrition and health care early in life, and in behaviors, such as smoking, exercise and diet. Past research has also shown that job insecurity, long hours, heavy demands at work and other stresses can also cut down on a worker’s life expectancy by taking a heavy toll on a worker’s health. (If you work in an office, here are some exercises you might try to prevent this.)
But researchers say this is the first study to look at the ways that a workplace’s influence on life expectancy specifically break down by racial and educational lines.
To do their analysis, they divided people into 18 different groups by race, education and sex. They then looked at 10 different workplace factors — including unemployment and layoffs, the absence of health insurance, shift work, long working hours, job insecurity and work-family conflict — and estimated the effect that each would have on annual mortality and life expectancy.
The data show that people with less education are much more likely to end up in jobs with more unhealthy workplace practices that cut down on one’s life span. People with the highest educational attainment were less affected by workplace stress than people with the least education, the study says.
Read the entire story here.
Image: Women mealtime at St Pancras workhouse, London. Courtesy: Peter Higginbothom. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.
The University of Leicester has one of these in its Attenborough Tower. In fact, it’s one of the few working examples left in Britain. Germany has several, mostly deployed in government buildings. For me, and all other Leicester students who came before and after, riding it was — and probably still is — a rite of passage. Many of the remaining contraptions have been mothballed due to safety fears and limited accessibility. What is it?
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The paternoster — is a dual-shaft revolving elevator (or lift). Despite the odd name (from the Latin for the Our Father prayer, often recited while fingering through rosary beads on a looped chain), it’s a wonderful Victorian invention that needs to be preserved, and cherished. Oh, and do you wonder what happens at the top or bottom of the loop? Do you get crushed? Does the paternoster cabin emerge upside down, with you inside? You’ll have to visit and ride one to find out!
From the Guardian:
As the paternoster cabin in which he was slowly descending into the bowels of Stuttgart’s town hall plunged into darkness, Dejan Tuco giggled infectiously. He pointed out the oily cogs of its internal workings that were just about visible as it shuddered to the left, and gripped his stomach when it rose again with a gentle jolt. “We’re not supposed to do the full circuit,” he said. “But that’s the best way to feel like you’re on a ferris wheel or a gondola.”
The 12-year-old German-Serb schoolboy was on a roll, spending several hours one day last week riding the open elevator shaft known as a paternoster, a 19th-century invention that has just been given a stay of execution after campaigners persuaded Germany’s government to reverse a decision to ban its public use.
That the doorless lift, which consists of two shafts side by side within which a chain of open cabins descend and ascend continuously on a belt, has narrowly escaped becoming a victim of safety regulations, has everything to do with a deeply felt German affection for what many consider an old-fashioned yet efficient form of transport.
In the UK, where paternosters were invented in the 1860s, only one or two are believed to be in use. In Germany which first adopted them in the 1870s, there are an estimated 250 and there was an outcry, particularly among civil servants, when they were brought to a standstill this summer while the legislation was reviewed.
Officials in Stuttgart were among the loudest protesters against the labour minister Andrea Nahles’ new workplace safety regulations, which stated that the lifts could only be used by employees trained in paternoster riding.
“It took the heart out of this place when our paternoster was brought to a halt, and it slowed down our work considerably,” said Wolfgang Wölfle, Stuttgart’s deputy mayor, who vociferously fought the ban and called for the reinstatement of the town hall’s lift, which has been running since 1956.
“They suit the German character very well. I’m too impatient to wait for a conventional lift and the best thing about a paternoster is that you can hop on and off it as you please. You can also communicate with people between floors when they’re riding on one. I see colleagues flirt in them all the time,” he added, celebrating its reopening at a recent town hall party to which hundreds of members of the public were invited.
Among the streams of those who jumped on and off as tunes such as Roxette’s Joyride and Aerosmith’s Love in an Elevator pumped out of speakers, were a Polish woman and her poodle, couples who held hands in the anxious seconds before hopping on board, a one-legged man who joked that the paternoster was not to blame for the loss of his limb, and Dejan, who rushed to the town hall straight from school and spent three hours tirelessly riding up and down. Some passengers were as confident as ballet dancers, others somewhat more hesitant.
Read the whole story here.
Video: Paternoster, Attenborough Tower, University of Leicester. Courtesy of inoy0.