This Job Killed You By Age 16 and Nobody Cared?! #bizarrehistory #history

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]There was a job in Victorian England where the average worker died at 19 years old, the wool comber. Their job, drag iron combs heated over open stoves through raw wool all day in a tiny unventilated room. The stoves burned constantly. The fumes filled the air and the wool dust filled their lungs. The Bradford wool combers report of 1845 revealed that the average life expectancy for wool combers and their families was just 16 years of age. 16.

[00:00:31]Another surgeon reported that wool combers died on average at 19 while widows in the same town lived to 38. The job killed you twice as fast as doing nothing at all. The wool dust was called devil's dust. It filled the air constantly causing a disease called wool sorters disease which was actually anthrax. The wool from infected animals carried anthrax spores breathed in every day in a room with no windows with no idea what was killing them. Would you still walk into that room? [music]