What Did People Do Before Alarm Clocks Existed? скачать в хорошем качестве

What Did People Do Before Alarm Clocks Existed?

SOMEONE KNOCKED ON YOUR WINDOW AT 4 AM (AND YOU PAID THEM FOR IT) It's 1900. Manchester, England. 4 AM. You're asleep in your second-floor bedroom when you hear it: tap tap tap on your window. You jolt awake, heart pounding. You stumble to the window and wave. Below in the dark street, there's a person with a long bamboo pole moving to the next house. Tap tap tap. Then the next. Then the next. This is your knocker-upper—the person you hired to wake you up every morning because you can't afford an alarm clock. Before cheap alarm clocks existed, factory workers, miners, and anyone who needed to wake before dawn hired knocker-uppers. These were usually elderly people or those who couldn't do physical labor, walking through dark streets in all weather, tapping on windows with long poles or shooting dried peas at glass. They got paid about sixpence a week per client—roughly five to ten dollars in today's money. For waking up earlier than everyone else. Every single day. No days off. Rain, snow, darkness—didn't matter. But here's the question nobody asks: who woke up the knocker-upper? Some claimed they had internal clocks from years of practice. Some used multiple cheap alarm clocks set at different times. Some used candle clocks that would fall when they burned to a certain height. And some? There were knocker-uppers who specialized in waking up other knocker-uppers. It's knocker-uppers all the way down. The job was harder than it sounds. You had to know which window belonged to which client in crowded tenement buildings. Hit the wrong window and you'd wake someone who didn't hire you. Some clients were deep sleepers who needed several minutes of tapping. Some would wave they were awake then immediately fall back asleep. And some clients wouldn't pay, which meant the knocker-upper lost income and the client probably lost their job. By the 1920s and 30s, mass-produced alarm clocks became affordable. Once you could buy a reliable clock for a day's wages instead of a week's, the choice was obvious. Why pay sixpence weekly when you could buy a machine once? Knocker-uppers started losing clients. By the 1960s, the profession was dead. The last known knocker-upper in England was Mary Smith, who worked into the early 1970s using a pea-shooter. We got cheap, reliable alarm clocks we controlled ourselves. No more depending on another person. No more anxiety about whether they'd show up. But we also lost something: the human connection of someone making sure you woke up. A job that gave elderly and disabled people income and dignity. Accountability—if your knocker-upper didn't show up, it wasn't your fault. Now you set five alarms on your phone and snooze through all of them. You wake up alone. If you oversleep, there's nobody to blame but yourself. The knocker-upper system was inefficient and only existed because people were too poor to afford basic technology. But it also meant every morning, before sunrise, someone was checking on you. Making sure you were okay. Making sure you didn't fail. This is the story of when waking up required another human being—and what we lost when we replaced them with machines. #forgottenhistory #historyoftechnology #nostalgia