[MarkMc]

From Steven Pinker's great book "Enlightenment Now":

The miner, it was said, “went down to work as to an open grave, not knowing when it might close on him.” . . . Unprotected powershafts maimed and killed hoopskirted workers. . . . The circus stuntman and test pilot today enjoy greater life assurance than did the [railroad] brakeman of yesterday, whose work called for precarious leaps between bucking freight cars at the command of the locomotive’s whistle. . . . Also subject to sudden death . . . were the train couplers, whose omnipresent hazard was loss of hands and fingers in the primitive link-and-pin devices. . . . Whether a worker was mutilated by a buzz saw, crushed by a beam, interred in a mine, or fell down a shaft, it was always “his own bad luck.”

A railroad superintendent, justifying his refusal to put a roof over a loading platform, explained that “men are cheaper than shingles...There’s a dozen waiting when one drops out.”