Having a fixed work schedule is a relatively recent development, introduced by the factory shift demands of the Industrial Revolution. In 19th-century England, watches were too expensive for the average worker. So a practical solution emerged: humans acted as alarm clocks. They were called ‘knocker-uppers,’ and their job was to make sure you didn’t sleep through your shift.
Starting in the early 1800s, mainly in the working-class neighborhoods of Northern England and Ireland, professional wakers would go door to door at ungodly hours, tapping on windows with long bamboo poles or shooting peas at glass panes. Their clients paid a weekly fee, often just a penny, to be woken at a specific time.
Some knocker-uppers built thriving side businesses, covering entire neighborhoods and keeping detailed ledgers of who needed waking and when. Others passed the job down through families, including the famous Mary Smith of East London, who used a rubber tube to shoot dried peas at her clients’ windows. The job was surprisingly competitive—after all, if you failed to wake someone, they might lose a day’s wages.
Knocker-uppers began to disappear by the 1920s as alarm clocks became cheaper and more reliable, but some were still around as late as the 1970s. In a world now run by digital assistants and smart devices, there’s something oddly comforting about the idea that someone once braved cold mornings just to make sure you got to work on time.
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