The Alarm Clock
—Christina
Listen here: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/hwts275--67871663
What woke you this morning? It was likely an alarm of some sort that roused you from slumber, and probably earlier than you would have liked. The form of the device varies: it might be a clock radio set to a buzzer or a terrestrial radio station, or maybe you have one of those old-fashioned clocks with the bells on top, or maybe, like us, you have a cat who wants her breakfast, but in this day and age, odds are you used an application on your phone. Humans have found many different ways to keep track of time over the last few millennia and, for most of that time, have also been trying to figure out a way to set a reliable alarm with these timepieces.
The earliest alarm clocks were water clocks that were designed to drop stones onto bells or gongs. The philosopher Plato used one to call his students to their classes at dawn. The next major step was the striking clock that sounded on the hour and at other set times. The earliest of these were also water clocks, though mechanical devices were developed by the end of the first millennium CE. These early striking clocks were large public items, found in town squares or monasteries where they served to remind those living nearby of times for work, prayer, meals, or rest. These proved it could be done, now what was needed was to make them small enough for home use.
Though we see many different clocks made over the previous few centuries, the first personal-sized clock we can point to with certainty was built by American inventor Levi Hutchins in 1787. His design only rang at his preferred waking time, four am. Because he built it solely for his use, with no intention of patenting or selling it, he didn’t develop a way to change the alarm time. He missed an opportunity, however, as Europe and the United States were on the verge of the Industrial Revolution, which drastically changed how people organized their days. The agricultural societies of the pre-industrial world weren’t concerned with the hours numbered in the day as much as they were with morning, noon, and night. People who needed to do things at certain times, like students going to class or religious people saying prayers throughout the day, were the minority; most people just followed the natural day, rising around dawn and going to bed once it was dark. The Industrial Revolution changed that, because the factories worked on a schedule that cared nothing for nature’s clock: workers had to be at the factory to begin their shift exactly on time and could not leave until it was time to go. One solution to making sure laborers showed up on time was the “knocker-upper,” a person who was paid to wake people by tapping on their windows. It was effective, as most were paid at the time of their wake-up call, meaning they’d keep knocking until their client was awake. It was an easy source of extra money for people who worked overnight shifts or who naturally found themselves awake at the early hour.
The first patent for an alarm clock was filed in France in 1847 by Antoine Redier. The user set the time by placing a pin in a hole on the number of the hour at which they intended to wake. Three decades later, a US patent by Seth Thomas began the American alarm clock industry. The essential design of a spring that tripped a bell at the set time didn’t change much for decades, and such clocks can still be found today. It wasn’t long before these mechanisms were attached to the first digital clock, patented in 1883, so-called because it used rotating disks to show the time instead of hands on a clockface. This was predecessor to the flip clock, patented only a decade later, on which the time is displayed using numbers on a vertically-oriented rotating drum that ticked each minute. Alarms for these types of clocks worked in the same way as earlier ones, though the bells were often hidden inside the case.
The electronic displays we now associate with the idea of a digital clock became available in the 1950s. With this development, a snooze function could be added, allowing the alarm to be delayed by five or ten minutes. This was first developed by General Electric in 1956. This was soon combined with a radio receiver, creating the clock radio and allowing people to be awakened by their favorite station instead of a bell or buzzer. Within a decade, the clock radio was a near-universal possession in the United States. It remained the standard for over a half-century, with small tweaks, like the addition of a tape deck, CD player, or iPod dock. But, in the last ten or so years, the smartphone has taken over the role of alarm clock (as it has the roles of so many devices). However, as computer technology has become more and more integrated into our daily lives, the clock radios and old-fashioned analog style clocks with the bells on top are becoming more popular with those who don’t want to be greeted with their notification feed first thing in the morning.