Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksaj | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that people seem to have focused on the child working, but thought nothing of the child apparently smoking a pipe.

View on HN

It wasn't that long ago that schools (even middle schools) had smoking sections for the students

Yea, one of my high schools had a smoking area as well. Two actually - the official one, and the one on the opposite side of the parking lot where all the metalheads hung out.

I thought it was weird that the other high school didn't have a smoking area, because we were in a tobacco farming town, and a huge number of teens worked in the tobacco industry.

This is fascinating. May I ask where and when (approximately)?

I attended middle school in the early 1980s and we didn’t have anything like that. My siblings attended middle school in an entirely different state, and neither did they. Nor high school. When you say “not that long ago”, precisely how long ago are you talking?

I think the 80s were an inflection point. It was pretty rare by 90s/200s. In 1986 apparently only 26% of (high?) schools still had smoking sections and 9% allowed smoking indoors[1]. I'd guess that the breakdown will vary drastically state by state but I haven't bothered to dig deeper :)

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/30/nyregion/school-smoking-b...

In 1987 my high school had a smoking area for students 17 years old or older.

And of course, the teachers lounge was always smoke filled, walking in there was like walking into a bar at time, the air had a visible haze of cigarette smoke. I don’t know how the non smoking teachers could handle it.

Graduated in ‘89, my HS had a smoking patio. Was closed in early 90s

I also graduated in ‘89 in Illinois and we had “Southside” - an outside smoking area at our high school.

Wonder if pipe smoking is healthier than coal mining?

If you combine them and smoke in a coal mine, you likely get all sorts of risk multipliers.

Most people who would be concerned about this would understand that a child who was forced to do that kind of work probably wouldn't make it to the age where smoking tobacco would kill them.

This reminds me how my father told me about how he was given diluted wine at the primary school canteen in the 50's in France.

This is also the time when the typical portion of wine was 1 bottle per person per day, everyday.

It's uninteresting, because dying in a mine was always obviously recognized as harmful, while smoking was not.

Cigarettes (and other forms of tobacco) were commonly referred to as "coffin nails" by the early 20th century, if not well before.

Congressional testimony from 1917: <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Select_Committees_on_Ci...>

And discussion (and cartoon) from a fictional treatment, also in 1917, The Academy for Princes by Olaf Morgan Norlie: <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Academy_for_Princes...>

There were formal smoking-cessation programmes in, of all places, Germany of the 1930s, on health grounds. Among other distinctive characteristics of the country at the time, it lacked a substantial domestic tobacco industry, or tobacco-growing colonies, to oppose such policies, as was the case in the US and UK well into the 1980s and 1990s.

Formal medical epidemiological determination of a link between smoking and specific diseases wouldn't come about until the 1950s or so, but a substantial factor here was simply the development of modern concepts of disease causation and correlative demonstration of these. Common wisdom acknowledged the connection long before then.

Google's Ngram viewer shows many instances of "coffin nails", again, commonly associated with cigarettes, dating to the 1820s: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=coffin%20nails...>

Likewise, they inhaled zinc powder because they believed it would protect you from the coal particles you inhaled all day every day at the mine.

My dad started smoking at age 5. Times have changed.

When I was 10, admittedly older than that, my friends and I took corn from a corn field and made a corn cob pipe, and put some stolen parental tobacco in it.

Nobody told us you don't simply burn things in raw corn cobs - there's some treatment involved before you can. I don't know if it was the tobacco, or the charring corn cob itself that made us gag most.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com