Episode Details

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Tonight, descend below the passenger decks of a transatlantic steamship and experience the voyage as a coal trimmer.

While passengers admire endless ocean views, enjoy warm meals, and relax beneath electric lights, your world is made of coal dust, furnace heat, iron machinery, and the endless scrape of a shovel. Deep inside the ship, you spend your watches moving tons of coal through dark bunkers, keeping the boilers supplied and helping maintain the enormous machine carrying hundreds of people across the Atlantic.

It is exhausting, repetitive, invisible work. You may be crossing one of the largest oceans on Earth, but you will see surprisingly little of it.

Get comfortable, close your eyes, and fall asleep beneath the decks of a great steamship, where coal becomes fire, fire becomes steam, and another luxurious ocean crossing quietly depends on men covered head to toe in soot.

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