Alarms before Alarm Clocks: A Shower Thought by Muhammad Raza

 

Alarms before Alarm Clocks: A Shower Thought by Muhammad Raza

Alarm clocks are used every day, whether an actual alarm clock or an alarm through another device. Children, teenagers, and adults alike use alarm clocks to wake up early, remind themselves of important meetings and deadlines, and stay organized. However, alarm clocks, like many other pieces of technology, were not always a thing, right? So how would people satisfy the purposes of using an alarm clock before the alarm clock came to be? While one could simply search for the answer to the problem, it is often amusing to speculate and fantasize about these problems and come up with potential solutions for the fun of it. It is also nice to let your mind wander once in a while, especially when you don’t have immediate access to Google. So let’s think about what people did before alarm clocks came around.

To help people wake up in the morning, maybe there was a guy whose job was to stay awake through the night and wake up people at a specific time. Someone could ask the “waker-upper” to wake them up at 7 in the morning, and the “waker-upper” would come to their house or hotel room and wake them up. Being a “waker-upper” doesn’t seem like that fun of a job though. Maybe it’s also possible, back then, that people would just wake up really early in the morning so that they would never miss a meeting or work or school, at the sacrifice of their sleep of course. But how did people keep track of deadlines or be reminded to do something at a specific time without alarm clocks and reminders? Well, it’s hard to answer that question. Maybe people always used to carry notes and agendas in their pockets, and then see what they had planned out for today. Maybe back then people were just super attentive and always kept track of the time, and never forgot to do anything. It is also likely that those who worked in offices had a personal secretary that reminded them of meetings and important times, and that’s still how it is today. I don’t know if everyone had their own personal secretary though, that would seem too expensive.