28-06-2025
Re-wind: The loud history of the alarm clock
We don't think of them as a luxury exactly, those few extra moments of sleep after one hits snooze on an alarm. But that's really what they are. A knocker-upper uses a long pole to wake workers in the Netherlands. (Wikimedia)
Through most of history, it was impossible to set a personalised wake-up call, unless one were royalty or nobility.
Before we get to how alarms have worked, through the centuries, have you ever wondered why the default snooze duration is nine minutes? Do you secretly think it's because the phone manufacturer is trying to help you cheat, and knows 10 would simply be too much?
It isn't that; well, not exactly.
Long before smartphones, the snooze feature existed in mechanical timepieces. Because of the way their gears were designed, it was nearly impossible to allow exactly 10 minutes of extra sleep before the alarm went off again. What clockmakers could manage was either a little over ten minutes, or a little under.
They chose the latter, rightly assuming that 11 would be pushing things too far. And so the nine-minute snooze was set. Digital clocks, and then smartphones, preserved this pattern. It was, by this time, habit and tradition. Today, it lives on still.
Meanwhile the alarm, in some form, has been around for millennia. Clocks — not mechanical or electronic, but water-based, star-based, shadow-based — have marked the hours for thousands of years. But the idea of a sound-based wake-up system? That's where it gets interesting.
In the 4th century BCE, Plato is said to have devised a kind of alarm for himself and his students: a system using vessels of water that would gradually transfer liquid until a final container emitted a whistle-like sound.
About 150 years later, the inventor Ctesibius in Egypt was experimenting with water clocks in which a series of falling pebbles triggered a gong. The early versions weren't loud enough so he reworked it to have more clang, ancient records indicate.
Fast-forward about 1,000 years and, in 8th-century CE China, the Buddhist monk and astronomer Yi Xing built a water-powered alarm that used gongs and bells to mark time and served as a sort of astronomical device, to predict phenomena such as eclipses.
Saved by the bell Today, alarm clocks such as the Clocky and Robot can even be set to run away from you to force you to start the day.
What about the modern world? Well, centuries before the wristwatch and bedside alarm, as cities around the world grew and became busier, people generally woke to public sounds.
Then, in medieval Europe, from about the 13th century on, town clocks and church bells began to standardise time, ringing on the hour or at fixed hours. These clocks ushered in a sense of shared schedule that bound a community. Perhaps more importantly, the first gong of the morning woke the exhausted labourer in time to begin the day's work. (Most church bells and clock towers still sound their first gong at 6 am.)
India had its own soundscapes that served this purpose. For millennia, the blowing of conches and ringing of temple bells have marked the beginning of morning rituals, indicating the time for prayer and for the commencement of the day. The first azaan at mosques serves this purpose too. Even today, in many homes, it is these acoustic cues that trigger the first sleepy shufflings of the day, as we proceed to bath, prayer, and the lighting of lamps.
It would be the 15th century before the first mechanical alarm clocks appeared in Europe. They had metal bells that could be wound so as to ring at a specific moment. These gadgets were expensive, and so the church and town clock continued to play their role.
Hour heroes
The 19th century changed all that. Industrial life demanded greater precision, and this meant, among other things, punctuality. Assembly lines, railway schedules, the postal service and office hours all required people to wake up and show up on time.
Delays were now measured not in quarter- and half-hours but in minutes, and each delay had the potential for cascading inconvenience. Still, most city-dwellers could not afford the alarm clock. So, in industrialising Britain, a service of 'knocker-uppers' emerged, men and women who woke especially early (who knows how they managed it) to do the rounds of the neighbourhood, knocking on windows with long sticks or shooting dried peas through straws to rouse the working-class.
Parallel cues emerged, and these still signal the arrival of morning: the milkman's bicycle bell, the long whistle of the first train pulling into a nearby station.
Then, in a rush, came the clock, the watch, the telephone. With new technology, exciting new options became available. One could log a request with one's telephone company for a wake-up call, and someone would call on the landline at the requested time (a practice often followed when one had an early train or plane to catch). The human operator was eventually replaced by an Interactive Voice Response System or IVRS. I don't know of anyone who uses it anymore.
Instead, in the 21st century, no two people need wake up to the same thing.
One may pick a gentle chime, easily ignored by others in the room. Or set a smart watch to vibrate so only you are alerted. One may set a white noise machine to ease sleep away with ocean sounds or whale calls. Or choose a rising melody or raucous bird call on one's phone.
With pen and paper gone, we also set alarms for the smallest things, and the biggest: anniversaries and birthdays, to pick up the laundry. We programme gadgets to ask, 'have you been drinking enough water today?' We say, 'Alexa, remind me to turn off the stove in 10 minutes.'
Some things remain unchanged, amid it all. One is the joy of having a little extra time to snooze. Another is the fear that one's alarm won't ring as it's meant to. Do you have a back-up alert set too, 'just in case'? With no one tapping at my window, I know I do.
