Knocker uppers and candle clocks: How people woke up before alarm clocks

By Jocelyn Timperley

From candles that drop metal pins every hour to the knocker uppers of industrial Britain, people throughout history devised plenty of cunning ways to ensure a timely wake-up.

During Britain's industrial revolution, new factories faced a need for strict timekeeping – including far more specific start times for workers.

A worker arriving even five minutes late could hold up an entire assembly line, losing their employers' profit. They needed a means to wake up on time, especially in the darker winter months, and while early alarm clocks existed at this time, they were far too expensive for a typical worker.

Factories tried using whistles and bells to wake and summon workers, but they often proved unreliable. Instead, an entire profession dedicated to awakening people sprouted up: knocker uppers.

These human alarm clocks would work their way down streets and sometimes whole neighbourhoods knocking or tapping on windows, or shooting peas at them, says Arunima Datta, associate professor of history at the University of North Texas. "They would stand there until they got a response from their clients, they wouldn't move."

In fact, jobs akin to knocker uppers have been used in many other societies around the world, says Datta, especially in Muslim communities during the holy month of Ramadan, when people needed to wake up early to pray and have their first meal before dawn.

Throughout history, people have had plenty of other inventive ways of waking up, from simply keeping roosters to clever candle clocks that dropped needles into metal trays every hour. 

Learning how these past societies slept and woke up could even help us improve our own sleep – and awakenings – today.

A cock's crow

Before personal alarm clocks were widely used, people often woke through natural cues and daily routines, according to Fatima Yaqoot, professor of sleep health at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. "Daylight was one of the main signals," she says. "In many pre-industrial societies, daily life followed the rhythm of sunrise and sunset, which naturally shaped circadian rhythms."

Circadian rhythms set the timing of sleep and waking and are one of the two main processes that make us sleep and wake up. The other is sleep pressure, which builds the need for sleep up throughout the day. "Together, they help explain why we fall asleep at night, remain asleep, and wake again in the morning," says Yaqoot.

It's not a world without alarm clocks. It's just that they operated in a different way – Sasha Handley

"I would steer away from the typical story that everyone in the pre-industrial world just went by the patterns of light and darkness," says Sasha Handley, a professor of history at the University of Manchester in the UK who led a project on sleep in the early modern age. "I don't think that's right, because people's labour extends well into the night, sometimes into the early hours of the morning, depending on certain tasks that need to be done at certain periods of the year."

Instead, she says, people would typically have a mixture of bodily and technological means of ordering their working times.

On farms, winter sleeping times might have been slightly longer since the earliest morning tasks have usually ended by the time autumn closes, says Handley. Still, there were lots of other reasons that people wanted to be up and about early.

"Religious motivations, for example, are a really important reason that people kept timekeeping devices next to their beds," she says. "They wanted to get to church at a particular hour, or say their morning prayers early in the morning, because they thought that brought them closer to God." There was often a sense of one-upmanship, she adds, in terms of who was up and at their prayers earlier than the next person.

People's entire sleep cycles were often different at the time. The preindustrial biphasic sleep pattern of two nightly sleeps remains one popular idea, though some scholars have questioned the theory's evidence base. Research shows that many cultures around the world still have polyphasic sleep cycles today, however. 

The noises of waking animals could perhaps be thought of as humans' first auditory alarm clocks. The rooster crowing with the dawn is a common signal that the day has begun, says Handley (intriguingly, research has shown roosters crow according to their own circadian rhythm, not just in a response to light). The dawn chorus was also important, says Matthew Champion, associate professor in history at The University of Melbourne in Australia.

These are the daily habits that have been really closely connected to sleep patterns for centuries and centuries – Sasha Handley

Bells were another widespread signal for waking up, says Handley. In medieval and early modern Western and Central Europe especially, life was organised around the parish unit, she says, and people used church bells, rung by a bellringer every hour, to start and organise their day. "The person ringing the bell has an hourglass to keep their time."

Of course, some houses also had their own bells inside, including outside bedroom doors. "The servants had bells, they would typically be the ones to get up in the household first, and it would be their responsibility to wake up the masters and mistresses of the households at the appropriate hour," says Handley. 

Ancient alarm clocks

There are also plenty of examples of very early personalised alarms. "It's not a world without alarm clocks," says Handley. They just operated in different ways, she says, using water or flames to trigger signals to awaken somebody close to them. "And the further up the social hierarchy you get, the more ornate and complex they become," she adds.

Candle clocks, with markings for incremental measurements of the passing of time, go all the way back to Ancient China. These were sometimes cleverly devised so that a nail would fall out into a little metal tray approximately every hour, says Handley. "You could make your own candles, which a lot of people did for cost reasons, as another auditory signal of when you wanted to be woken up".

Incense was also used to keep time in China, sometimes with metal balls hanging by threads which would fall into a tray below, acting as gongs. A 19th Century account by an American ethnologisteven noted people in China placing incense sticks between their toes to wake themselves up.

Water clocks, known as a clepsydra in Ancient Greece, were widespread for centuries, and the philosopher Plato is credited with first adapting one into an alarm in the 5th Century BC. He trapped air inside a vessel which water was flowing into; as the water increased so did the pressure, eventually resulting in a loud kettle-like whistle. Water clocks were also some of the earliest automated village bells, notes Champion. They used large basins of water which when drained would lead to the striking of a bell – one 12th Century chronicle records such a water reservoir being used to put out a fire. 

The first mechanical clocks – meaning oscillating mechanisms that mark the passing of time, linked to an escapement that counted these beats – first arrived at the end of the 13th and early 14th Centuries.

"From very early they sometimes played tunes before the ringing of bells," says Champion. By the later 15th Century, domestic wall clocks also began having alarms, set using a pin, he says. "The alarm was a bell chime, and later repeated striking of a small bell."

Knocker uppers

Clockmaking advanced significantly in the 17th Century, says Handley, and there is evidence of people "mackling up their own alarm clocks when they go travelling, for example", she says. The first known mechanical alarm clock was invented in 1787, although it was only after the first patent was registered in 1876 that production became more widespread. Still, these wound spring alarm clocks were both unreliable and too expensive to be widely available for most people.

In the industrial revolution, though, sleep requirements changed for many people, and knocker uppers, with their rods, sticks and peashooters, became prevalent across the growing industrial towns of Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and in east London. 

Knocker uppers would stay up all night and often begin waking people up at 3am, says Datta. In a way, they also looked after society, she adds, "in terms of noticing things that seemed off, because they were up and about at hours of the night where other people are sleeping". In 1876, one knocker upper discovered a 2am fire in a Bradford house and awoke the family who were soundly asleep inside, saving their lives. It was also a knocker upper who in 1888 discovered the body of Jack the Ripper's first victim, Mary Nichols. 

Sometimes knocker uppers were so persistent at waking their charges, neighbours would complain and fights would even break out, says Datta, who has scoured the police reports and newspaper accounts from the time. "They also feature in a lot of magazines or cartoons," she says. "That neighbours are fighting over being woken up when they didn't want to be woken up."

Similar professions also sprang up in other European countries in the 19th Century. "In Italy, they had hooters," says Datta. "In France, they had reveilleurs." These were even less subtle than knocker uppers: they sounded shrill whistles to awaken their clients.

By the 1920s, though, the knocker upper profession had largely died out, as alarm clocks became more commonplace and affordable. "Personal alarm clocks became widely used in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries," says Yaqoot. "Their spread closely followed the rise of industrialisation and the adoption of artificial light. Daily routines that had once been more flexible gradually became organised around the clock."

A regular hour

It's often assumed that sleep in earlier times was more natural and therefore healthier, says  Yaqoot, but the reality was probably more mixed – everything from crowded or noisy homes to physically demanding work may have affected how people slept.

Still, some aspects of this pre-alarm era are worth considering today. One, she says, is the higher exposure to daylight of many earlier societies, especially during the morning.

"Research continues to show that morning light is one of the strongest signals for regulating circadian rhythms and supporting healthy sleep timing," says Yaqoot. Exposure to artificial light later in the evening can have the opposite effect, she adds. "It can delay the body clock and make it harder to fall asleep."

Another lesson is how people historically viewed keeping regular hours of sleeping and waking as crucial to looking after their health.

"That's a kind of healthcare principle that's inscribed in older medical literature, dating back to the ancient Greeks, but going right through into the 18th Century," says Handley. "People do take the imperative to look after their sleep and keep a regular hour really seriously, perhaps much more so than we do now."

These practices chime with today's research showing the health risks of irregular sleep hours, she says, noting regular sleep times are also "actually a really effective way of making sure that you wake up at pretty much the same time every day without an alarm".

We can also learn from other good sleep hygiene practices of the past, says Handley, such as "thinking about the bedroom space… what's in there that's actually promoting good, timely, restful sleep, and what's in there that isn't". Considering the timing of your last meal is also important, she says – and avoiding stimulants like sugary foods in the hours before sleep.

"These are just the daily habits that have been really closely connected to sleep patterns for centuries and centuries that we seem to have forgotten a bit about in recent times."