How it happened
- Anc.Water clocks with signals: water flowed into a vessel, displaced air and made whistles sound or balls drop.
- Med.Monastery mechanisms woke the bell ringer so he could call everyone else to services on time. Precision was needed for the prayer schedule.
- 1787An American craftsman made a home alarm clock, but it rang at just one preset time, with no option to choose another.
- 19th c.Mechanisms with adjustable times appeared, and factory workers became the main buyers.
The fourth timeline entry explains the whole demand. While people lived by the sun, they had no need for alarm clocks; factories, with shifts starting at the sound of a whistle, made waking at an exact time a matter of earning a living.
Clocks also remained expensive for a long time. While a mechanism cost as much as a month's wages, it made more sense for a worker to pay someone to wake her.
The knocker-up profession
In industrial cities, this was a real profession: a person with a long pole went from house to house, tapping on second-floor windows until the resident responded. For a small weekly fee, the knocker-up woke dozens of clients, and people did this work until the middle of the 20th century.
They had professional techniques, too. Some used a tube to shoot dried peas at the glass; the main requirement was to wake the client without waking the neighbors who did not pay.
The profession disappeared not because alarm clocks appeared, but because they became cheaper. As soon as a mechanism cost less than several weeks of the service, there was no point in paying a person.
The snooze button, by the way, appeared much later for technical reasons: the gear design made an interval of about nine minutes possible, and it has remained the standard ever since.
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Sources
- Devices for giving a signal at a set time have been known since antiquity
- the widespread adoption of household alarm clocks is linked to the industrial work schedule of the late 19th century. In Britain's industrial cities, paid wake-up services for residents existed until the middle of the 20th century