Our contemporary civilization is time-dependent. We have to do almost everything on schedule. We must have the clock in order to function, whether we are attending classes, working, or meeting friends. Although keeping the hours has become necessary, it can occasionally be stressful.
However, depending on and being reliant on day and nighttime hours is nothing new. Even in ancient times, people had obligations that needed to be met on time. Sleeping the whole day was not on the agenda of our ancestors.
So how did ancient people wake up on time before the alarm clock was invented by the ancient Greeks?
We are aware that Ctesibius, an ancient Greek engineer, scientist, and mathematician who resided in Alexandria, Ptolemaic Egypt, is the source of the fundamental concept of an alarm clock.
The father of pneumatics, a field of engineering that uses gas or pressured air, was Ctesibius (285-222 BC). He is a brilliant scientist who was ahead of his time. Some people have even called him an ancient genius. His three creations—the suction pump, the water clock, and the hydraulis, a musical instrument that predates the pipe organ—are what made him most famous. The oldest clocks in history are water clocks.
However, long before people learned about water clocks they still managed to get up on time.
Water was also important to Native Americans, although not in the same sense. Native Americans may wake up sooner than anticipated by drinking plenty of water, but unfortunately not to a specific time. This over-drinking practice was utilized by Native Americans well into the 20th century.
Fragment of a basalt water-clock, with evaporation time markers on interior as dots on djed and was hieroglyphs. Late period, 30th Dynasty. From Egypt. The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, London. Credit: Public Domain – CC BY-SA 4.0
Another efficient technique used by the ancient Egyptians helped them wake up on time. Ancient Egyptians created the world’s first mechanical clock in 245 B.C. thanks to their clever ingenuity. They simply put water “into a vessel on an hourly basis to tell the time. By adding an alarm mechanism such as a pellet hitting a metallic plate, an effective alarm clock was created.”
Religious bells were used to signal the passing of time throughout the day before watches were commonplace as time went on and more people converted to Christianity. Christians were aware that churchgoers were summoned to prayer each morning by the sound of bells. Prayers used to signal the beginning of the day for Muslims, and they still do so today.
The Knocker Upper gained popularity during the Industrial Revolution, a time when alarm clocks were neither affordable nor dependable. In Britain and Ireland, rousing persons who were asleep so they might make it to work on time was the job of a Knocker-Upper. Factories recruited someone to “knock on windows with a long stick or a pea shooter to make sure employees arrived at the mill on time.”
A knocker-upper in Leeuwarden. Credit: Public Domain
But who woke the knocker uppers? According to author Richard Jones, “the knocker uppers were night owls and slept during the day instead, waking at about four in the afternoon.”
One problem knocker uppers faced was making sure workers did not get woken up for free.
“When knocking up began to be a regular trade, we used to rap or ring at the doors of our customers,” Mrs Waters, a knocker upper in the north of England told an intrigued reporter from Canada’s Huron Expositor newspaper in 1878.
“The public complained of being disturbed… by our loud rapping or ringing; and the knocker-up soon found out that while he knocked up one who paid him, he knocked up several on each side who did not,” she continued.
The answer they came up with was to alter a long stick so they could tap on their clients’ bedrooms’ windows loudly enough to awaken the targeted recipients but softly enough to not disturb the others.
However, one can image how exhausting it must have been to walk in the early, cold morning when everyone was asleep in a warm bed. Eventually, as alarm clocks became more affordable and everyone could buy one, the Knocker-Upper vocation disappeared.
