How Did People Wake Up Before Alarm Clocks?

Before alarm clocks, some people paid a stranger to shoot peas at their bedroom window. Here is how people woke up on time for most of history: sleeping in two halves, clocks that told time with fire, the knocker-uppers of industrial England, and the time America ran out of alarm clocks. Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:36 The sun was the alarm 2:43 The first alarm clocks 4:44 The knocker-uppers 6:47 The clock that rings 7:45 The great alarm clock shortage 8:27 The snooze button 9:05 What changed 9:43 Wrap-up Sources Every fact in this video comes from the sources below. Search the titles to read them yourself. The body clock. Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2017, awarded to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young for discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm. First and second sleep. A. Roger Ekirch, At Day's Close, Night in Times Past (2005), and his article Sleep We Have Lost, Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles, American Historical Review (2001). Plato's water alarm. Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, book 4. Ctesibius's alarm water clocks are described by Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, book 9. Chinese incense fire clocks. Royal Museums Greenwich, Chinese Fire Clock. JSTOR Daily, Keeping Time with Incense Clocks. King Alfred's candle clocks. Asser, Life of King Alfred, translated by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (Penguin, 1983). Roman night watches and cockcrow. Wikipedia, Roman timekeeping, and Watches of the night. The word clock. Oxford English Dictionary, clock, from medieval Latin clocca, bell. Knocker-uppers and Mary Smith. BBC News, Knocker uppers, Waking up the workers in industrial Britain. Atlas Obscura, Remembering the Knocker-Ups Hired to Wake Workers With Pea Shooters. Photograph of Mary Smith by John Topham, 1931. Levi Hutchins, Antoine Redier and early alarm clocks. History.com, Who Invented the Alarm Clock. Atlas Obscura, A 2,000-Year History of Alarm Clocks. The Westclox Big Ben alarm clock. National Park Service, Westclox Big Ben Clock. The wartime alarm clock shortage. Clockhistory.com, Westclox Waralarm. Collectors Weekly, War Alarm Clock, c. 1940s. The snooze button. GE-Telechron Snooz-Alarm, 1956. Willamette Week, How and why did the snooze duration on alarm clocks get codified as nine minutes (2026). Waking up before the alarm. Jan Born and colleagues, Timing the end of nocturnal sleep, Nature (1999). Benjamin Franklin's joke proposal. Benjamin Franklin, An Economical Project, Journal de Paris (1784). Pictures are illustrations made for this channel. Narration is an AI voice. Subscribe for more hidden history of everyday stuff.