Vintage photos show how dangerous railways, mills, and other workplaces used to be

Railroad work was one of the most dangerous jobs in the US.

Even as workers were building the railroads in the second half of the 19th century, it was dangerous.

"You had a clear segmentation of who was doing the construction of the railroads versus who was an engineer in a locomotive or who was a fireman or a brakeman," Rosenow said. "And the construction efforts, oftentimes, went to immigrant labor populations."

For example, in the 1860s, the Central Pacific Railway hired thousands of Chinese immigrants for some of the deadliest jobs, from working with explosives to scaling cliff faces.

Despite the risk, they received a third less pay than their white coworkers.

Derailments were common, but workers also died coupling cars or working on tracks.

Many factors contributed to the danger of rail travel in the US. Collapsing bridges, landslides, and faulty equipment all caused train derailments or collisions. By the early 1900s, thousands died in railroad accidents every year. In 1905, trains injured over 86,000 people.

However, workers bore the brunt of the danger. "In 1890, about one in every 300 railroad workers was killed," Rosenow said. The majority of the deaths were from "little accidents," as one railway claim agent called them.

Railroad workers had to walk between cars to couple and uncouple them. They rode on top of trains to work the brakes. Faulty boiler equipment released steam scalding enough to cause deadly burns.

"One of the most dangerous occupations on the railroads was that of a brakeman, who had this perilous task of stopping the trains," Rosenow said.

Trains were so dangerous that many railways supported hospitals along their routes.

As train travel expanded in the latter part of the 19th century, railroad companies built or helped fund hospitals and created in-house medical organizations that could care for passengers during emergencies. By World War I, 10% of all US doctors worked for the railways, at least part-time.

Railway surgeons treated rail passengers and crew by setting broken bones, amputating limbs, and treating burns. Receiving adequate medical care might dissuade them from bringing a costly lawsuit.

Physicians also provided regular medical care for company employees. The railways used these benefits to gain worker loyalty and tamp down unionizing, according to "Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828—1965."

As railroads expanded into the Pacific Northwest, an increasing number of loggers risked their lives to fell trees.

The fir, spruce, and cedar trees of the Pacific Northwest helped build boomtowns during the California Gold Rush. When railroad tracks finally connected the East and West Coasts, they offered a cheaper, more efficient way to transport lumber.

Logging was arduous. Fallers climbed and cut trees by hand with axes or saws. Other workers, known as buckers, stripped the bark and sawed the trees into logs. Newer technology in the 1880s called a donkey engine transported logs through the air with cables and pulleys, risking crushing workers if the machinery failed.

In the early 1900s, one in 150 Washington loggers died each year. Falls, toppling trees, and severe weather all killed and seriously injured lumber workers all over the US.

Even a single construction project, like the Brooklyn Bridge, could cost over a dozen lives.

The Brooklyn Bridge was a massive construction project that started in 1869. At the time, its 1-mile length would make it the world's longest bridge.

To anchor it in New York City's East River, workers known as "sand hogs" spent months digging through the muddy river floor. They needed to sink caissons, rectangular bowl-like structures filled with pressurized air, all the way to the bedrock, as deep as 60 feet below the water.

When they resurfaced, the workers would feel stabbing pains in their joints, get red splotches on their skin, and begin projectile vomiting. Some died from what's now known as "the bends" or decompression sickness.

Historian David McCullough estimated that the bends, falls, debris, and other accidents killed at least 27 people during the project, Esquire reported in 2014.

Meanwhile, women and children took on grueling work in textile mills.

At the end of the 18th century, textile mills with new manufacturing technologiesbrought the Industrial Revolution to the US. By the late 19th century, women were doing 75% of the work of making cloth in Lowell, Massachusetts, Scientific American reported in 1879.

Many came from rural areas of New England, swapping farm work for factory jobs. Since many women left their families behind and lived together in boarding houses, they formed new communities.

The boarding houses often had curfews and behavior codes, and at least one company's handbook warned it wouldn't employ anyone "known to be guilty of immorality."

Most of the women were between 15 and 30, but there were children working at textile mills as well.

Jobs as spinners and doffers were seen as "children's work" in cotton mills.

In 1900, children under 16 made up a quarter of the South's 100,000 textile workers. Child labor grew over the next few years, with 20,000 kids under the age of 12 entering the work force by 1904, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In cotton mills, children were prized for their small and nimble fingers. Spinners, often girls, would fill bobbins or cones with thread, and doffers, usually boys, would replace them on the device.

When a family started working at his mill, one owner said, "it was the children of the family who became skilled employees," the BLS reported. Even kids under 10 could join their parents at the mill and get to know their future workplace.

In many families, children were expected to contribute financially by ages 10 to 12.

In 1900, 1 in 5 children worked, per the US Census. Many belonged to low-income families who needed extra income or to get out of debt. Other children had no one else to rely on.

Organizations like the Charles Loring Brace Children's Aid Society moved orphaned children around the country on trains to supply rural areas and factories with cheap labor, according to the BLS.

One estimate put a child's mill earnings in 1860 at an average of $0.57 per day, about $22 a day now.

Mill workers spent long hours breathing in cotton dust, which led to respiratory illnesses.

Workers endlessly inhaled cotton dust, giving "every one the appearance of having a cold," according to one report from the 1870s. Many had likely contracted byssinosis, a disease that causes coughing, wheezing, and shortness of breath.

Other investigations during this time found the long hours, stifling conditions, and physical stress of the work made otherwise healthy people sick. One physician commented on the "careworn, dejected appearance" of the mill workers he treated.

Dark, unventilated buildings created brutal working conditions.

It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that public health reformers connected a building's temperature and humidity to workers' health, according to "When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries."

Textile mills could be hot and humid. Some owners refused to open the windows, even in summer, because they thought the warm, moist air was the ideal environment for manufacturing the cloth. Other industries had even worse ventilation.

An 1895 study of New York bakeries found the bakers worked for over 100 hours a week in cellars or basements that were "damp, fetid, and devoid of proper ventilation and light."

Workers got sick after exposure to radium, phosphorus, and other chemicals.

A vast array of conditions could arise from many different industries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Match makers in the late 1800s developed phosphorus necrosis or "phossy jaw." The disease caused infections that could lead to painful swelling and exposed bone. Wool workers picked up parasitic diseases from handling the material. Vaporous odors were so strong that brassworkers drank whiskey or beer to cope. A new factory worker in the early 1900s could show symptoms of lead poisoning after just a few weeks.

In 1907, Illinois held the US' first commission on occupational disease. The purpose was to "investigate causes and conditions relating to diseases of occupation" in metal, glass, brick, and other industries.

New machinery caused deadly accidents.

In factories and mills, moving belts, saws, and other unguarded machinery caused terrible injuries and death, from detached limbs to decapitations to disembowelings.

Even those who weren't killed or injured by the machines could still be negatively affected. Lucy Larcom, who worked in mills in the mid-1800s, wrote the thrum of the mill made her head ache, and some weavers became deaf after long-term exposure to the machinery's noise.

Laundry devices damaged fingers so badly that they had to be amputated.

In 1906, a laundry machine known as a mangler pulled Marguerite Murray's hand into its steam-powered roller. It took nearly 10 minutes to free her.

Later, her doctor described her hand as looking "parboiled, cooked and bruised." Several fingers needed to be amputated, and the pain kept her awake at night, she later said.

In a lawsuit against her employer, Murray's mother testified that her daughter required constant care and could no longer feed or dress herself. Whenever the injured woman was left alone, "she commences to cry and worry," her mother said.

Children were hurt, too.

Between 1908 and 1924, Lewis Hine, an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), took pictures of child laborers.

In some photos, he documented children's injuries, including lost fingers from working in textile mills.

While factory and mill work brought them some economic freedom, women also demanded rights like shorter working hours.

One aspect of mid-19th-century mill work that made it so grueling was the long hours. Starting at around 5 a.m., the employees worked 12 to 14 hours, six days a week. They had to pack the rest of their lives into their time off.

"How much is done in the three short hours from seven to ten o'clock," one mill girl wrote in 1845.

While they appreciated the higher wages than they would earn elsewhere, many women in Lowell, Massachusetts, began organizing and pushing for 10-hour workdays in the 1830s and 1840s. Eventually, mills shortened the days to 11 hours.

Though the demographics of Lowell and its labor movement began to shift toward the end of the 19th century, women continued to demand changes. In 1873, over 100 women in Lowell walked out to protest the hot and humid conditions of their workroom.

Working with steel led to horrific injuries.

In 1906, the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers' Union in Chicago compiled the number of deaths and injuries and found that 147 of its 1,358 members were killed or seriously hurt in a single year.

Writer Charles Rumford Walker worked at a steel mill and described the conditions in the Atlantic Monthly. The workers' cries of warning continued to echo in his head. "Watch out for the crane that is taking a ladle of hot metal over your head, or a load of scrap, or a bundle of pipes; watch out for the hot cinder coming down the hole from the furnace-doors," he wrote.

It was often difficult for workers to hear those shouts, though. Working in an environment with molten metal and thunderous clanging could be a deadly mix.

The steel industry could ruin a worker's health.

Steel mill shifts were typically 12 hours but every two weeks, workers would stay for 24 hours to rotate from working days to nights.

In summer, laboring near blistering furnaces could get so hot that workers had to "take off their boots, and pour the perspiration out of them," one journalist wrote.

It was rare for older men to withstand these conditions. The "long hours, the strain, and the sudden changes of temperature use a man up," according to one worker. "He quits before he gets 50."

A deadly strike in 1892 made it difficult for steel workers to organize.

In the late 1880s, Carnegie Steel tried to break up one of the US' most powerful labor unions, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.

The AAISW had led several strikes to improve working conditions. In 1892, negotiations between the company and the union stalled, and Carnegie planned to lock the workers out and bring in replacements.

On July 6, the strike turned deadly when workers traded gunfire with agents from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, whom the company had hired as security. Seven workers and three agents died.

In the aftermath, membership in the union declined, weakening its ability to affect change.

A 1907 exposé brought to light the perilous conditions of the steel industry.

In 1907, writer William B. Hard published "Making Steel and Killing Men." In addition to the 46 deaths at US Steel's plant in Chicago, Hard estimated there were hundreds of others who were permanently or temporarily disabled.

The 46 workers "went to their deaths by a large number of different and divergent routes," Hard wrote. Blast furnaces, dynamite, electrocution, falls, falling objects, and hot metal could all be killers in a steel mill.

"Must we continue to pay this price for the honor of leading the world in the cheap and rapid production of steel and iron?" he wrote. "Must we continue to be obliged to think of scorched and scalded human beings whenever we sit on the back platform of an observation car and watch the steel rails rolling out behind us?"

Mining was another extremely dangerous occupation.

"It's, by the nature of the work, inherently dangerous to go under the earth to excavate the coal," Rosenow said. In the early 1900s, around 3,000 US miners died and another 12,500 were seriously injured each year.

Paid by the ton for the coal they mined, workers didn't receive money for safely securing their worksites. They would stabilize the roof with coal pillars and timber, but falling rocks still caused the majority of mining deaths.

Others died from explosions or by falling down mine shafts.

"We believe that more than half the casualties are directly caused by overwork and long hours in the damp and foul air of the mine," the National Labor Tribune wrote in the 1880s. Reducing workers' hours from 14 or 12 to eight would reduce the number of deaths, the paper added.

Children spent long days in dark, dirty mining jobs.

Boys as young as 9 worked in the mines, some in dangerous roles.

Trappers would open doors dozens of times a day to let coal cars pass. Breaker boys separated impurities like slate from the coal as it moved by on conveyor belts. Others helped their parents with whatever tasks needed to be done.

They often worked in dark, dust-filled areas for long hours, making the equivalent of $16 to $24 a day.

"Mother, I don't want to go into that dark hole," one boysaid, adding, "I'll do anything if I don't have to work there."

In 1914, 11 children died when the National Guard tried to break up a strike.

Throughout the late 1800s, mining unions pushed for improvements "whereby the lives and health of our members may be better preserved."

In 1913, thousands of miners went on strike after the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company refused their demands for an eight-hour workday and the ability to choose their doctors and housing. CF&I evicted them from their company-owned homes, and the miners and their families moved to tent camps.

On April 20, 1914, the National Guard tried to break up the camps and killed several miners. Two women and 11 children died when a burning tent collapsed on top of the cellar where they were hiding, suffocating them. The tragedy became known as the "Ludlow Massacre."

A 10-day war followed, with miners attacking mines and strikebreakers.

A series of mining disasters caused hundreds of deaths, shocking the nation.

In 1909, one of the worst mining disasters in US history occurred when a fire erupted at the St. Paul Coal Company's mine in Cherry, Illinois. It trapped over 200 miners underground.

Samuel Howard kept a diary of the ordeal. "The only thing I regret is that my brother is here, and cannot help my mother out after I am dead and gone," he wrote. He and 258 others lost their lives, and many of their families had no means of supporting themselves.

Two years earlier, a mine explosion in Monongah, West Virginia, killed 362 people, including several children. In 1913, 263 people died in another explosion at a mine in Dawson, New Mexico.

A horrific fire at a factory in New York City also brought attention to dangerous working conditions.

On March 25, 1911, workers found themselves trapped on the upper floors of a building with no way out. The employees of the Triangle Waist Company, mostly women, were trying to escape a fire but locked stairwell doors barred their way out.

Desperate to get out, some jumped to their deaths. By the time firefighters had put the flames out, 146 people had died, many of them young immigrant women. Some were just 14 years old.

Days after the fire, tens of thousands of people walked for hours in a procession to honor the dead.

"[Owners Isaac] Harris and [Max] Blanck, the Triangle Company, have offered to pay one week's wages to the families of the dead girls — as though it were summer and they are giving them a vacation!" reformer Martha Bruère wrote at the time.

Unions and reformers helped bring about new safety laws.

Tragedies like the mining explosions and factory fire helped spur what Rosenow called "regulation by disaster."

"For decades, Americans really didn't have a good sense of what was happening in American workplaces or were in a state of denial," he said. These headline-making tragedies in the early 20th century grabbed their attention.

Reformers, journalists, and the workers themselves already knew about the dangerous conditions and had long been trying to change them.

The labor unions not only pushed their companies to make conditions safer, they also put pressure on elected officials to keep track of workers' deaths and injuries and to make safety laws, Rosenow said.

Today, some industries have higher rates of death, injury, and illness than others.

In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act into law, which established a minimum wage, the right to overtime pay, and rules for child labor. Government agencies such as the Bureau of Mines were created to find ways to prevent workplace disasters like fires and explosions.

While the frequency of mining disasters has dropped, they do still happen. In 2010, an explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia killed 29 people.

Other industries, such as construction, have the highest number of worker fatalities from falls and transportation-related incidents. Miners, agricultural workers, and other laborers can also be exposed to chemical hazards that cause long-term damage.

Sources for this story include "Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865-1920," "Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era," "Chamber Divers: The Untold Story of the D-day Scientists Who Changed Special Operations Forever," " Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828—1965," "When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries," " The Cotton Dust Papers: Science, Politics, and Power in the 'Discovery' of Byssinosis in the US," the Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Park Service, US Department of Labor, Economic History Association, Library of Congress, Smithsonian Magazine, and PBS.