Living beforealarm clocks

Song China: postulants at the door, and the weather

Meng Yuanlao reached the capital, Kaifeng, in 1103 and left it in 1127. In 1147 he dated the preface of the Dongjing meng hua lu, his book of what he remembered:

About 150 years separate that scene from the next one. Wu Zimu’s Mengliang lu describes Lin’an, today’s Hangzhou. Its preface carries a cyclical date that the Siku editors read as 1274, while doubting it.

The four names between the weather calls are court sessions, rendered word for word; what each session was, we could not source. In the list of who hurries to work our two blind translators read two phrases differently, so the English keeps only what both were sure of.

Court texts name a caller of their own. The Zhou li (Rites of Zhou) lists the cock-man: “大祭祀，夜呼旦以叫百官”, “At the great sacrifices, at night he cries out the dawn to call the hundred officials.” Nothing in it says the officials were asleep. Wang Wei opens a court poem with him: “絳幘雞人送曉籌”, “The cock-man in a crimson headcloth brings in the dawn tally.” Both translations are ours.

In 1869 John Thomson photographed Old Wang, a night watchman in Peking. Wang is not a dawn-caller. Thomson wrote that he “employed also a wooden clapper to let the inmates of the house know he was astir, and to scare away thieves”. His government salary was “sufficient for his own support, yet by the time the amount reaches his hands through the official channel, it dwindles to about six shillings a month, and a regulation sheep-skin coat once a year” (Thomson, Illustrations of China and Its People, 1873 to 1874, as quoted in the Wellcome Collection’s record).

At a monastery in Fujian in 1870 to 1871, Thomson photographed a monk striking the bell. By the Wellcome Collection’s account, Thomson recalled being woken there each morning by the monks’ chanting or by the ringing of this bell. His 1898 book has a plate titled “The Morning Bell: Yuen-fu Monastery”.

The Islamic world: a call given while it is still night

Sahih al-Bukhari gives these words of the Prophet Muhammad about the call of Bilal, in the chapter on the call to prayer before dawn:

The call for the dawn prayer carries a line of its own:

Edward William Lane, an Englishman, published his account of the modern Egyptians in 1836: “Every night during Rum´ada´n, criers, called Moosahh´hhirs, go about, first to recite a complimentary cry, before the house of each Moos´lim who is able to reward him, and at a later hour to announce the period of the sahhoo´r, or last meal.” Two rounds, then. The first begins about two hours after sunset. “There is one of these criers to each khoot´t, or small district of Cairo.” He carries “a small drum, called ba´z”, and, “Having previously inquired the names of the inmates of each house, he greets each person, excepting women, in the same manner; mentioning every brother, son, and young unmarried daughter of the master”. The call for the last meal comes on the second round.

Lane tells one more scene with the evening greetings, not with the later call: “At many houses of the middle classes in Cairo, the women often put a small coin [...] into a piece of paper, and throw it out of a window to the moosahh´hhir; having first set fire to the paper, that he may see where it falls: he then, sometimes by their desire, and sometimes of his own accord, recites the Fa´t´hhah, and relates to them a short tale, in unmeasured rhyme, for their amusement”. The women are awake, and listening to a story.

India: a king woken by trumpets, water clocks, and a gong

The Arthashastra, in R. Shamasastry’s translation of 1915, sets out a king’s day: “Hence the king shall ever be wakeful.” Day and night are divided into eighths by nálikas “or according to the length of the shadow”, and a náliká is “the time during which one ádhaka of water passes out of a pot through an aperture”. The king goes to bed “amid the sound of trumpets” in the third part of the night and is “awakened by the sound of trumpets during the sixth part”. On a twelve-hour night from 6 p.m. that is about 1.30 to 3 a.m., by our reckoning.

The Chinese monk Yijing wrote of the monasteries of India:

In another book, in J. Takakusu’s translation of 1896, Yijing adds: “clepsydrae are much used in great monasteries in India. These together with some boys who watch them are gifts from kings”. A drum was struck each time the bowl sank and a conch blown at the hour, so that “even when rainy nights continue, there is no fear of missing the watches”. The purpose, in his words: “announcing hours to the monastics”.

Babur, in his memoirs for 932 AH (1525 to 1526), found that in “all considerable towns” of Hindustan men called g’harialis struck a brass plate “perhaps as large as a tray” to mark the time. He changed the signal for the night and for cloudy days, and wrote that it “did very well”: now “anyone happening to wake in the night and hear the gong” would know which g’hari, a span of 24 minutes, of which night watch it was (tr. Annette Susannah Beveridge, 1922). The change was for whoever already lay awake.

Rome: roosters, bakers and a schoolmaster

Pliny the Elder, on the cock:

Martial’s Rome had other noises:

The schoolmaster starts before the birds:

The neighbours’ offer is a question; the poem does not say he took it. And the baker, in a two-line poem: “Surgite: iam vendit pueris ientacula pistor / Cristataeque sonant undique lucis aves”, “Get up: the baker is already selling the boys their breakfasts, and the crested birds of daylight are sounding on every side.” (Martial, Epigrams 14.223, our translation).

Petronius has a joke about a rich man, Trimalchio, told by another man’s slave. It is satire, not a record of how Romans woke:

The monastery night

The Rule of Benedict makes calling the hour a named job:

And it plans for the sleepy:

The hour is set too: “Hiemis tempore, id est a kalendas novembres usque in Pascha, iuxta considerationem rationis, octava hora noctis surgendum est, ut modice amplius de media nocte pausetur et iam digesti surgant”, “In wintertime, that is, from the first of November until Easter, as reason sees fit, they are to rise at the eighth hour of the night, so that they rest a little longer than half the night and rise with their food digested.” (Rule of Benedict, ch. 8, our translation).

At Bury St Edmunds, on the night of St Etheldreda in 1198, the shrine caught fire. Jocelin of Brakelond:

Jocelin never calls the clock an alarm, and never says it woke the monk: the clock struck, and the monk who got up found the fire. That the clock held water is our reading of “some to the clock”.

Edo: a bell its listeners seem to have paid for

In everyday Japan the hours were unequal, day and night each split into six, until 1873. Edo’s first public time bell is said to have been set up at Honkokuchō under the second shogun and to have rung about every two hours. After the great fire of 1657 more bells were added, until the town magistrates ran two, Honkokuchō’s among them, and the magistrate for temples and shrines 13, counting later moves. The houses within earshot of the Kokuchō bell, 410 town blocks in all, seem to have paid bell money of 4 mon a month per house-owner (after Masuyama Kazunari, Chūō City Board of Education, 2024). Masuyama quotes an Edo comic verse, a senryū, without naming its collection:

The Seiko Museum Ginza holds a late-Edo lantern clock with a double foliot that both struck the hours and had an alarm.

England and Amsterdam, 1849 to 1934: the knocker-up

Robert Holland’s Cheshire glossary of 1886 has the definition: “KNOCKER-UP, s. one who calls up factory hands in the morning. The very curious avocation of waking the mill hands in the manufacturing towns early in the morning, so that they may be able to get to their work in good time, and avoid being fined for being late, is quite a special and recognised business. The knocker-up is paid, I believe, about twopence per head per week. He carries a long pole with which he taps at the bedroom windows of his clients.”

The newspaper lines on this page come from New Zealand papers. We read them as the scans’ machine-read text, not on the page images, so they are quoted in lower case as that text gives them. The Otago Witness, 19 September 1889: he receives “from 3d to 6d a week” from each client, and if the tap fails “he will rattle the door or thunder at the shutters”. The Mataura Ensign, 17 June 1892, reprinted “Ten Minutes with a Knocker-Up” from Cassell’s Journal. The man woke people “by rattling wires fastened to a long stick” against their windows. He said he had “above two hundred to knock up every morning”, and “they pay me 2d a week”. Also: “nearly everybody among working folk has a knocker-up”. And he admitted that he sometimes overslept a little, and then had to tell his clients to hurry because he was late. The trade, the piece says, is “a favourite refuge for men” grown too old for their own work. The Star of Christchurch, 12 January 1909, in a report headed “A Lancashire Strike”: “the knocker-up [...] finds his occupation gone”.

Amsterdam’s word was porder. The Rijksmuseum holds eight records of the porders’ printed good wishes: New Year sheets for 1845, 1849, 1850, 1875 and 1896, fair sheets for 1849 and 1875, and newspaper pages of 31 December 1910. The fair sheet of 1849 is headed “Heilwensch van den Porder, aan de Ingezetenen der Stad-Amsterdam. 10 September 1849”, “Good wishes from the porder to the inhabitants of the city of Amsterdam. 10 September 1849.” It is signed “UEd. Dienaar, J. SENIJ, Porder”, “Your Honours’ servant, J. Senij, porder.” Its verse:

The verse says there was no fair that year because of the sickness; an official cancellation is not shown. The New Year sheet for 1875, signed Jan Looge, porder, prints the same woodblock 26 years on.

On 14 June 1934 the Evening Post of Wellington printed an unsigned piece, “The Knocker-Up”, about a mining village in England. Its line: “one may think that alarm clocks are cheap enough”. Cheap or not, the piece goes on, it gets complicated when three or four people in one house want waking at different times. The piece reports that the knocker-up walked a beat like a policeman’s, and that a door chalked 345 told him three people inside wanted waking: one at three, one at four and one at five.

The Americas: two glimpses

Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa), born in 1858, remembered his Dakota boyhood in a book of 1902. His uncle “began to give sudden war-whoops over my head in the morning while I was sound asleep. He expected me to leap up with perfect presence of mind”, or fired his gun “just outside of the lodge while I was yet asleep”. That is training a boy to wake ready, not to wake on time.

The Codex Mendoza (about 1541, or by 1553 at the latest) shows a man whose job was to watch the stars at night to tell the hour (after Stephanie Wood, Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs).

No first, and no year

The sources we read give no first alarm clock, and no year when alarm clocks reached most bedsides. They give dated things. In 1198 a monastery clock struck before matins. About 1725 to 1735 Paulus Bramer of Amsterdam made a watch with an alarm; its silver dial has an alarm ring, by the Rijksmuseum’s record. In a reprint of 17 June 1892 a knocker-up could say that “nearly everybody among working folk has a knocker-up”. On 14 June 1934, 42 years later, a newspaper could write “one may think that alarm clocks are cheap enough” about a village where the knocker-up still walked his round.

The stories that don’t hold up

“Plato invented the alarm clock.”

The source is Athenaeus, quoting Aristocles, who says only that it is said: “λέγεται δὲ Πλάτωνα μικράν τινα ἔννοιαν δοῦναι τοῦ κατασκευάσματος νυκτερινὸν ποιήσαντα ὡρολόγιον ἐοικὸς τῷ ὑδραυλικῷ οἷον κλεψύδραν μεγάλην λίαν”, “it is said, that Plato showed a sort of notion of the invention, making a nightly clock like the hydraulic organ” (Deipnosophistae 4.174c, tr. C. D. Yonge, 1854). The Greek goes on to liken it to a very large water clock. Third-hand, and nothing about sound or waking.

“Ctesibius built water alarms that whistled at a set time.”

Vitruvius lists what the water clocks did besides tell the time: “moventur sigilla, vertuntur metae, calculi aut ova proiciuntur, bucinae canunt, reliquaque parerga”, “little figures move, cones turn, pebbles or eggs are thrown out, trumpets sound, and the other extras” (De architectura 9.8.5, our translation). Nothing in the passage is set for a chosen hour, and nothing in it wakes anyone.

“Levi Hutchins of Concord, New Hampshire, invented the alarm clock in 1787.”

His Autobiography (1865) describes his clock-making and never mentions an alarm, in either of the two scans searched. His son’s addenda say: “In winter he arose at four o’clock”. A newspaper telling of 2020 has a clock fixed at 4 a.m. and gives no source. The Bramer watch with an alarm is more than 50 years older than the story.

“Seth E. Thomas patented the first wind-up alarm clock on 24 October 1876.”

US patent 183,725 of that date is titled “Improvement in clock-cases”. Its text says “The works need involve no novelty” and covers the case, winding, setting, regulation and a hanging ring. There is no alarm anywhere in it. His other patents were not checked.

“Knocker-ups used pea-shooters.”

The three accounts above give a long pole (1886), a long cane (1889) and wires fastened to a long stick (1892). The 1892 writer first took the noise for “the rattle of peas” from a giant shooter; then “the supposed man with the pea-shooter” turned out to carry the stick.

“Roosters crow at dawn.”

They start before dawn, on an internal circadian clock, the top-ranking bird first, and they also crow when something sets them off (after Shimmura, Ohashi and Yoshimura, Scientific Reports, 2015, and Shimmura and Yoshimura, Current Biology, 2013).

“Incense alarm clocks date from about 1100.”

Hong Chu’s Xiang pu describes an incense that tells the time, with nothing about waking: “近世尚竒者作香篆其文準十二辰分一百刻凡然一晝夜乃巳”, “In recent times those who love novelties make incense seals, the pattern ruled to the twelve double-hours and divided into a hundred ke. Lit, it burns through a whole day and night and only then is spent.” (our translation). In Fujian, Thomson saw a joss-stick timepiece: “Each stick will burn for twelve hours”, and “Thus the time of day or night might be ascertained at a glance”. An early 19th-century Chinese dragon incense clock at Royal Museums Greenwich dropped metal weights onto a metal tray with a clang, which the museum calls a regular time signal.

“The Ramadan crier goes back to Bilal.”

Bilal’s night call is in Sahih al-Bukhari. The district crier with his drum is in Lane (1836). No source we read links the two.

“Before alarm clocks nobody needed to wake at a set time.”

Benedict’s monks rose at the eighth hour of the night in winter. Kaifeng’s callers woke people bound for court and market. The Arthashastra’s king was woken in the sixth part of the night. Bilal’s call came while it was still night, and Martial’s two lines say to get up because the baker is already selling breakfast.