How Did People Wake Up Before Alarm Clocks?

For about 300,000 years, nobody owned an alarm clock. So how did anyone get up on time? We follow the morning across history: hunter-gatherers who wake before sunrise without a sound, Roman clients lining up at their patron's door at first light, a Chinese alarm clock made of fire, the clock invented to wake monks at 2 a.m., the strange "first sleep" and "second sleep" of the past, and the people paid to tap on your window with a long pole. And at the end, the answer to who really ended the night. Chapters 0:00 – The machine you trust more than yourself 1:05 – Who sleeps more? 3:55 – A morning with no alarm 5:57 – The first people who had to be somewhere 8:12 – An alarm made of fire 9:29 – The machine built to wake monks 11:09 – The night that had a middle 12:59 – Waking up for money 15:07 – The answer was inside you 16:26 – You and them Sources • Yetish, G. et al. (2015). Natural Sleep and Its Seasonal Variations in Three Pre-industrial Societies. Current Biology. • Samson, D. R. et al. (2017). Chronotype variation drives night-time sentinel-like behaviour in hunter–gatherers. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. • Martial, Epigrams 4.8 and 9.68. • Bedini, S. A. (1994). The Trail of Time: Time Measurement with Incense in East Asia. • Dohrn-van Rossum, G. (1996). History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders. • Ekirch, A. R. (2005). At Day's Close: Night in Times Past. • Wehr, T. A. (1992). In short photoperiods, human sleep is biphasic. Journal of Sleep Research. • Born, J. et al. (1999). Timing the end of nocturnal sleep. Nature. What time would you wake up with no alarm at all? Tell me in the comments. #history #sleep #ancienthistory