This Used To Be a Thing: Link-boys
Have torch will travel.
Say you’re in London, maybe the early 1800’s. You’ve had a grand evening carousing at your local pub, but it’s time to call it a night. You grab your hat, cloak, and cane, and stumble outside.
Pitch black. No streetlights. No flashlights. Not even an iPhone! How are you supposed to make it home without tripping over a cobblestone, or running into a tree, or falling down some stairs? Especially in your condition!
Have no fear, your local link-boy is here.
Before you start cracking jokes, think of a link-boy as kind of a Victorian-era version of an Uber.
These youngsters would typically hang around popular London night spots — theaters, taverns, gambling halls — lit torches in hand. They’d wait for patrons to exit and solicit their services to guide them home via torchlight.
For a small fee, of course. Torches ain’t cheap, you know.
(By the way, the term “link” came from the material used for the wicks.)
These children became especially useful due to London’s notorious fogs which, due to industrialization, became more and more frequent and polluted. Some became so thick and smoggy the link-boys would sometimes be needed in the middle of the day.
This was, of course, great for these mostly poor young boys who needed the money. However, due to their station, they weren’t always trusted by those who sought to hire them. Stories abounded of link-boys suddenly dousing their torches mid-route, only for their charges to be quickly ambushed by thieves laying in wait.
The more upstanding link-boys, however, would safely escort their patrons to their destinations, then take their giant matches elsewhere to find more customers.
Of course, the more well-to-do didn’t need to worry about hiring these unknown (and possibly unsavory) characters to illuminate their paths. They had torch-bearers already in their employ.
Once their employers were safely home, these link-boys could clock out for the night. They extinguished their torches using kind of an upside-down metal horn (called a link extinguisher, natch), snuffing them out by stuffing them into the cones.
Many link extinguishers still exist today, bolted onto the sides of old London buildings that once housed these wealthy families.
As usual when time marches on, technological advances ultimately doomed the link-boys. Though they held on through the appearance of the earliest gas street lamps, which were fairly dim and spaced too far apart to provide much illumination, by the mid- to late-19th century the need for link-boys had pretty much been extinguished.
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