Knocker uppers and candle clocks: The quirky ways people woke up before alarm clocks

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 may even help us improve our own sleep – and awakenings – today.

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.

"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........

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