Some kind of norse telescope? An instrument to detect scandal? Neither. This week's archaic word originated in 1802 with an invention to automate chimney sweeping and to put dusty child labourers out of danger. After last week’s word related to coughing, it seems rather apt. Created originally by Camden timber merchant and carpenter George Smart (1758-1834), it was designed to rid chimney sweeps of the need and dangerously difficult, and often cruel practice of using small boys to climb up or down the inside of chimney stacks to get in those hard-to-reach places. It worked via a series of hollow rods attached to each other, assembled when pushed up through the fireplace with a cord running through them. When the first pole reached the top, the cord was pulled to open out a brush, which could then be pulled through the chimney to clean it. Here's a diagram:
The original Scandiscope design
The invention put forward with the backing of many customers, was also encouraged by the not entirely succinctly titled ""Society for Superseding the Necessity of Climbing Boys, by Encouraging a New Method of Sweeping Chimnies, and for Improving the Condition of Children and Others Employed by Chimney Sweepers” founded in the London Coffee-House on Ludgate Hill, and included anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce. Here is part of the campaign poster, with a handy little rhyme:
Scandiscope comes to the rescue
Just as well. It was all about trying to prevent this kind of thing:
Down with this sort of thing …
In 1805, Smart won the gold medal from the Society of Arts for the greatest number of chimneys cleaned by mechanical means. The design was also adopted and improved in the mid-19th Century by inventors like Joseph Glass and it became increasingly used across the London and elsewhere. Even today a similar method is still in use, perhaps even without the pull-cord, simply a series of rods a meter long to help estimate more precise locations, and very occasionally, when repair is required to old buildings, a digital camera attached.
So where does chimney sweeping go up the smoke stack in song?
Let’s push the first rod in the direction of Sam Hall, the traditional, tragic tale of a sweep who robbed the rich, by The Dubliners:
Oh my name it is Sam Hall chimney sweep, chimney sweep
Oh my name it is Sam Hall chimney sweep
Oh my name it is Sam Hall and I've robbed both great and small
And my neck will pay for all when I die, when I die
And my neck will pay for all when I die
There's nothing glamorous about that life, of course there's the Hollywood treatment that sweeps all hardship aside, with Dick Van Dyke reaching the heady heights of the worst ever accent in film history in Disney’s Mary Poppins, alongside Julie Andrews in 1964:
The artificial sheen of that movie is swept aside by the Mamas and the Papas, in one of their strangest and most beautiful songs from the self-titled second album of 1966:
I wouldn't want to be a chimney sweep
All black from head to foot
From climbing in them chimney
And cleaning out that soot
With a broom and ladder and pail
The darkened walls I scale
And far and high I see a patch of sky
And finally, in this week’s sweeping musical summary, there is also beauty real tragedy in the form of Leslie Ann Levine by The Decemberists from their debut album in 2002, Castaways and Cutouts:
On the roofs above the streets
The only love I've known's a chimney sweep
Lost and lodged inside a flue
Back in 1842
So, any more musical smoke up your chimney on this theme, or indeed other obscure inventions? Feel free to share any further examples in songs, instrumentals, on albums, film, art or other contexts in comments below.
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