What Did People Do Before Alarm Clocks?

Before the alarm clock, someone had to wake up the city. In Victorian England that job had a name: the knocker-upper. Armed with a long bamboo pole and a wire tip, she walked her route in the dark before dawn, tapping on bedroom windows until she heard movement inside, then moving on to the next house without waking the street. Missing the mill bell cost a worker half a day's wages. She was the difference between a family eating that week and not.

But the knocker-upper was just one answer to a problem humanity has been solving since the beginning of civilization. The Romans had water clocks. Medieval monasteries had a monk whose entire job was to stay awake so nobody else had to. The Ottomans had drummers.

Then the cheap alarm clock arrived and an entire profession vanished within a generation. This episode is about everything that came before it.

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The first house on the route is number four, Cobden Street, and you know before you reach it that the upstairs window will be dark. It is always dark. Thomas Holt works the half past four bell at Ancoat's Mill, and he has never once in three years been awake before you arrived. You know this the way you know everything on this route. Not because someone told you, but because your feet have walked it four hundred times, and your hands have tapped every window on it, and your ears have learned the difference between the silence of a person still sleeping and the silence of a person who has heard you and is deciding whether to move. You are Mary Pennington, and you are fifty six years old, and you have been working this route through the back streets of Ancoats in Manchester since your husband died and left you with two children and a rent that did not care about either of those facts. That was fifteen years ago. The children are grown. The rent is still there. So are you at half past three in the morning, with your pole over your shoulder and your coat buttoned to the chin against a November that has decided to be serious about itself. The pole is bamboo, ten feet long, light enough to carry for miles, stiff enough to transmit a tap from the street to a second floor window without bending so much that it becomes a scrape. At the working end you have tied a short length of wire twisted into a loose bundle. Wire against glass makes a sound that carries through sleep in a way that wood does not. You learned this by trial during the first winter, when you were still using a wooden knob, and half your clients were sleeping through you and docking your pay on Saturday to make the point. You stand in the street below number four and raise the pole and tap the wire against the glass. Three times, evenly spaced. Then you wait. Every person on this planet who has ever needed to be somewhere at a specific time before the invention of the mass-produced alarm clock has faced exactly this problem that sleep does not negotiate, that the body's internal clock is unreliable and inconsistent, and that the consequences of oversleeping in many times and many places have been severe enough to demand a solution. The solutions that different civilizations arrived at are so varied, so ingenious, and so revealing of their own particular priorities that they amount to a kind of history of human society told from the dark side of midnight. The oldest mechanical solution on record was water, a clay or stone vessel with a small hole near the base, set to fill or drain at a measurable rate, markings on the interior wall showing the passage of hours. The Egyptians were using versions of this device as far back as 1,400 years before the Common Era. The Greeks improved it. The Romans carried it across their empire, and for roughly 2,000 years the Klepsidra, from the Greek for water thief, was the most reliable timekeeping instrument available when the sun was not up. Roman military camps used them to time the night watches, dividing the darkness into shifts so that no soldier had to stand guard for more than a few hours. Julius Caesar, campaigning in Britain, used one to calculate that summer nights in the north were shorter than in Rome. He was right, and it must have been a strange comfort measuring the darkness with dripping water in a country that felt like the edge of the world. The Klepsydra had problems. Water expands and contracts with temperature, which means the flow rate changed with the seasons, which means the hours it measured in winter were longer than the hours it measured in summer, which means that a Roman night watch timed by water in January was a different length than one timed by water in August. The engineers who built the more sophisticated versions tried to correct for this with floats and gears and overflow tanks that maintained constant pressure, and some of them got remarkably close to accuracy. A Greek engineer named Tasybius designed a version in the third century before the Common Era that remained the world's most accurate timekeeping instrument for nearly two thousand years, which is a run that no technology since has come close to matching. But even Catusybius could not make water ignore the cold. In winter, the liquid in the clocks had to be kept warm with small torches. Timekeeping in the ancient world was, among other things, a fire management problem. The monasteries of medieval Europe solved the problem differently. The rule of Saint Benedict, written in the sixth century and adopted by most Western monasteries within a few generations, required monks to pray at eight fixed points through every twenty four hours, including one in the middle of the night, around two in the morning, called vigils or matins. For this to work, someone had to be awake when everyone else was asleep, and that someone had to be reliable enough that eight hundred years of monastic life could be scheduled around his wakefulness. The solution was rotation. A different monk each week was assigned to watch through the night. He tracked the hours by whatever means the monastery provided, a water clock, a marked candle, the position of the stars through a window, his own trained body, and when the appointed hour arrived he rang the bell that brought the rest of the community out of their beds and into the cold dark of the church for the first of the day's prayers. This arrangement required that the community trust the night watcher completely because every other monk's sleep depended on him, and every other monk's spiritual schedule depended on the bell, and the bell depended entirely on one person remaining awake in a stone building in the middle of the night when everything around him was designed for sleep. There is an entire literature of monastic rules around keeping the night watcher from dozing. The most direct solution was to make the vigil uncomfortable enough that sleep was not an option. Benedict's rule was not interested in physical comfort as a virtue. Deliberately interrupted sleep was part of the life, and the monks who kept it for decades found, as research on cloistered communities conducted much later would confirm, that their bodies eventually adapted. They developed a natural temperature drop in the evening and arise around the appointed hour that anticipated the bell by more than an hour. The body, given enough years of consistent instruction, learned to wake itself. In Istanbul, the solution was music. During Ramadan, the month of the Islamic calendar, in which the faithful fast from dawn until sunset, someone must wake the community for the meal that must be eaten before the fast begins each morning. The hour is early. The darkness before dawn in Istanbul in a winter is deep and cold. The person who carries the waking through the streets of the city is called the Davulku, the drummer, and what he carries is a Davul, a large double headed drum worn on a strap across the chest, and played while walking, its sound travelling through the narrow streets and up into the apartments where the faithful are sleeping and need to rise. The best Davulku do more than drum. They chant short, rhythmic poems beneath windows, poems that are at once a greeting and a summons, and the skill of composing these poems on the move through a dark city is considered a serious art, distinct from the drumming and practiced by fewer and fewer people. Today, across Istanbul, there are three thousand Davulku who go out before dawn during Ramadan to wake the faithful in more than 900 neighborhoods. The tradition, rooted in the Ottoman military bands whose drums marked the rhythm of imperial life, has continued without significant interruption for well over a century. Some residents of the older neighborhoods say they have no alarm clock and have never needed one. In each of these solutions, what you are looking at is not just a method for waking someone up. You are looking at how a civilization organized its relationship with time and with the obligation to be somewhere at a specific hour. The Roman soldier, woken by the water clock, is being asked to serve an empire that runs on military precision. The monk woken by the bell is being asked to serve a god who requires prayer at fixed hours. The Istanbul household woken by the drum is being asked to honor a faith whose practice is inseparable from the shared rhythms of a community. The technology in each case reflects the values of the institution that built it, which brings you back to Cobden Street in November of eighteen seventy five, and to what the knocker upper reflects about the world that produced her. The shape has moved behind the glass. Thomas Holt is upright. You move on. The mills that dominate the city were the first institutions in human history to require synchronized mass timekeeping at industrial scale. Not two dozen monks rising together, not a regiment dividing the night watch. Hundreds of men, women, and children, from dozens of streets and neighborhoods, all required to be inside the same gates at the same moment, every morning, six days a week, or face a financial penalty that could consume a day's wages. The machinery did not wait. The engine was running before the gates opened, and the gates closed on the bell, and if you were standing outside them when they closed, you were quartered. Quartering is what the mills called it when a worker arrived after the starting bell and the gates had shut. You could not enter. You waited. When you were finally admitted, a full quarter hour's wages was deducted. Not the minutes you actually missed, but the full quarter, because the accounting was done by the quarter, and the accounting did not bend. A spinner at Ancoats earned perhaps nine or ten shillings a week when the frames were running well. A quartering cost two shillings and three pence. Miss two mornings, and you had worked those two days almost for nothing. The mill's solution to the waking problem was to make the consequences of failing catastrophic and to leave the mechanism of success to the workers themselves. What the workers themselves had was you. Not much. Sixpence a week is the standard rate for a knock between five and six. You charge eight pence for anything before five, because before five the streets are dark enough that the footing is uncertain and the cold is the kind that gets into the joints and stays. You have thirty one regular clients on this route. On a good week you clear just over seventeen shillings. The question everyone asks, and they never stop asking, is who wakes the knocker upper? The answer in your case is habit. Fifteen years of rising at half past three will do things to a body's internal accounting of time that are difficult to explain and easy to observe. You lie down at nine and you wake at half past three, and there is no mystery to it. Your body has simply accepted that half past three is when the day begins and has organized itself accordingly. The medieval monks would have recognized this immediately. The body learns. It does not need to be told twice once you have told it ten thousand times. For knocker uppers who do not trust habit, the answer is each other. There are seven people working roots in this part of Ancoats. The ones who start earliest wake the ones who start slightly later, because the routes overlap at the edges, and you pass each other in the streets in the dark, and there is a nod that means I am here, which also means you can sleep another twenty minutes if you need to. This is not a formal arrangement. It has never been discussed. It works because it is useful and because the streets at half past three are quiet enough that two people who share a purpose do not need to explain themselves. The last house on the route is Vera Hollinsworth on Back Blossom Street, who needs to be up by six for her shift at the weaving shed. She wakes at the first tap, has the window open before the second. She always says the same thing. Thank you, love. Same as always. You are not sure she is fully awake when she says it. It does not matter. She is up. You turn back toward home. The streets are still dark, but they are changing, the darkness thinning at the edges in the east, the first mill chimneys beginning to smoke against a sky that is not yet decided on its color. In the houses behind you, thirty one people are getting dressed in the cold and putting the kettle on and finding their boots, and making the calculation of whether there is time to eat before they leave. In twenty minutes they will be walking through streets that are filling with other people, making the same calculation, all of them pointed toward the same bells. The adjustable mechanical alarm clock was patented in France in 1847 by a man named Antoine Redier, thirty years before Mary Pennington walked her route in Ancoats. The patent was not the obstacle. The obstacle was price. A reliable wind-up alarm clock in the eighteen seventies cost more than a working class household could justify for a single function that a woman with a pole was providing for sixpence a week. It was not until the Seth Thomas Clock Company began mass producing a standardized bedside alarm in the late 1870s, and not until the price dropped far enough through the 1880s and 1890s that the device became accessible to the households that actually needed it most, that the knocker upper began to lose clients, not all at once. Gradually, the way any useful thing fades when a cheaper and more convenient thing appears to do the same job. The last professional knocker upper in Britain is generally believed to have retired in the early 1970s, in a Lancashire mill town where a handful of older clients had never made their peace with the clock and saw no reason to start. By that point, the problem that every civilization had solved in its own way, with water and bells and drums and bamboo poles, had been solved by mass manufacturing and cheap metal and the standardization of time itself across whole countries and then continents. The solution arrived everywhere at roughly the same moment, because the industrial economy that created the need for synchronized mass timekeeping also created the factories and distribution network that made the device possible. The problem called the solution into existence, and the solution was a small machine on a bedside table, and it cost less than a week of sixpenses. You put the pole over your shoulder and walk home. The need it solved is as old as obligation itself. The need to be somewhere at a specific time when the body would rather be somewhere else, which is to say, asleep.