I just looked at the BLS statistics website, to try to determine the percentage of Americans employed in agriculture. I thought it was around 3%, which is astonishing. But it appears that it's now less than 1%, even more astonishing.
bls.gov
Lots of occupations are gone. I could be nasty and point out the astonishing decline in buggy whip manufacturers, but I understand your point.
I used to work in photolithography. When I started, one of my first employers was 70 years old, and had a crew of old-timers who used to be whizzes at what they called hand-separating colors.
You may have read that colored photos in magazines are printed using four colors - magenta, cyan, yellow, and black. Printing presses use a set of four negatives to print photos in magazines, and when superimposed the inks approximate all the colors of the rainbow.
In the old days of letterpress, every color had to be printed individually. Then they figured out how to do the four color process using photolithography.
Well, these old guys could separate colors for letterpress. That's how long they had been in the business.
In the meantime, they had learned to separate the colors for four color process.
But when I started, everyone was using electronic devices for separating the colors. This was in 1975.
I shot one of the really big cameras, the ones that needs a room eighteen feet long to use. The old guys worked at night, preparing metal cuts for ads in newspapers.
Then newspapers got rid of metal cuts. Everything was done using negatives, which was fine by me because I shot negatives.
But then computers started coming in.
I saw the writing on the wall and went to law school. Good thing, too.
Similar thing happened to my mother. She used to set metal type on a Linotype. Then she used an electronic device that set type on photo paper. Now it's done on computers, and she's in sales.
Nobody in their right mind would want to go back to metal type. |
