Ah, it’s a frosty morning and you’ve found the perfect fold in the blanket to snuggle into. Maybe the cat has jumped on the bed with you. You begin drifting into a pleasant dream.
“…And now the major news stories of the day…”
The dream shatters. The cold in the room seems to sharpen. A little groan passes your lips.
The alarm clock has struck again.
It might seem peculiar to our time, but alarms have been around for centuries and that’s not about to change. What will change, however, as it has since the days of the ancient Greeks, is the way the alarm gets us up. We’ve come up with some interesting devices to rouse us out of bed, some practical and some that are worse than nightmares.
How about the one that starts flying around the room and can’t be stopped until you get out of bed to catch it? But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s first look at how alarm clocks came about. They go back farther than you’d think.
In the distant past there were no alarm clocks, which make sense since there were no clocks. Nature took care of things. A crowing rooster, babbling baboons, or simply the sun dissolving the night did the trick. When all you’re doing is hunting and planting, this works quite well.
But times change. People moved from dividing time into days, months, and years into hours using water, sand and candle clocks as well as sundials. When a few people began needing to get up at a certain hour, tinkerers devised ways to help them.
The water (klepsydra) and candle clocks worked best as ancient alarms. The first alarm is attributed to the philosopher Plato (427-347 BC) who lived in Athens, Greece. Water clocks work by water dripping at an hourly rate. Plato simply set up a siphon in the lower container that collected the water. The water rose toward the curve of a siphon. When the water reached it, it would be drawn off into another jar where the escape of air through holes created a whistling noise waking him.
Someone else discovered that the weight of rising water could activate a small catapult that tossed a pebble against a metal plate. Another method added gears that turned as the water level changed causing a bell go off at a certain point in the motion.
The candle, too, could do its morning duty. It worked by having a metal ball embedded in the wax. As the candle burned down at a known rate the ball would be released into a metal plate. The Chinese during the T’ang Dynasty (AD 618-907) substituted incense sticks that burned and dropped metal balls into a dragon vessel lined with pewter.
Water alarms that rang a bell (the name clock comes from “clocca” meaning bell) were used well into the Middle Ages mainly in monasteries. The sacristan had to be awakened at the proper hour to get the other monks up so they could chant their prayers. But by now the disadvantages of using water were apparent; klepsydras aren’t terribly accurate, as the water level got lower the flow lessened, water evaporates and worse it can freeze. Eventually, instead of falling water a falling weight began to turn the mechanisms.
While falling weights allowed the creation of giant tower clocks that clanged their enormous bells, the invention of the spring allowed clocks to become smaller. Now they could be in every room, including the bedroom. They took on the shapes of eggs, skulls, and pigeons and could hold an alarm. One, the Ostrich Alarm with Bear Cub Automaton, had the bear beat a drum at the appropriate hour. Another clock went so far as to draw the curtains and open a window while still another brewed a hot cup of soup.
Even gunpowder made its way into the bedroom. One alarm had a figure that became animated as the waking hour approached. Suddenly, from a pistol in its hand came a sharp report while the discharge lit a nearby candle.
Mostly, these alarms were for the wealthy. They were really novelties. One clock-maker, however, a New Englander named Levi Hutchins, became upset if he didn’t get up at exactly 4 a.m. So, in 1787, he stuck the workings of a large clock into a smaller cabinet and inserted a pinion, or gear. When 4 a.m. arrived the gear was tripped setting a bell in motion.
Hutchins’ clock kept ringing until the spring ran out and only went off at 4 a.m. In 1847, a Frenchman named Antoine Redier developed the adjustable alarm, so you could pick any time to awaken. With time becoming more important as the Industrial Revolution progressed, more and more homes had one.
But as simple as Hutchins’ and Redier’s alarms were, people still came up with strange ones. One of the strangest was Mr. Savage’s Alarum Bedstead first unveiled in 1851. This contraption sounded a bell in the morning but, if the sleeper ignored it, it automatically stripped off the bed clothes. If this didn’t work, the mattress slowly tilted sideways dumping the sleeper onto the floor.
During the next decades alarms gradually changed. Wealthy people did away with alarms and, instead, put them in the rooms of servants. The servant heard the clanging and then gently awoke the master. A man named Simon Willard decided it would be more natural to have a hammer beat on a piece of wood rather than a metal bell. Not too many people agreed. Finally, late in the nineteenth century a nerve-calming shut-off switch was added to clocks with the unimpressive name of “tin can alarms”.
From there things moved fast. The repeater alarm surfaced. One, the true-Vermonter, sounded a bell then after a short interval the ear-splitting noise started again. Electricity allowed motors to move hands and the sound of bells began to be replaced by beeps, chirps, and songs. The sleeper gained a certain amount of power postponing the inevitable when the “snooze” alarm came along.
Today alarms are only limited by our imaginations. And, boy, have we let our imaginations go wild.
Two methods of being awakened, the Quiet Alarm and the Surfer’s Dream Pillow, are some of the nicest. Both don’t use bells or buzzing. Instead the pillows vibrate waking only that sleeper. But the Surfer’s Pillow goes one step further. That pillow is connected to computer software that monitors wave conditions nearby. If the waves are great, the pillow vibrates strongly, if not the vibrations are softer or not activated at all.
Most alarms, however, seem to have a diabolical streak. There’s Clocky, for instance. It’s an alarm with wheels. When you hit its snooze button it rolls off the table and looks for a place to hide. You have to find it to turn it off. Another alarm lets you hit the snooze button more than once, but each time you do the clock, which is attached to the ceiling, slowly rises out of reach until you have to get up to make it stop buzzing. The Anemone Alarm rumbles and shakes it way across the room. Even when you pick it up it keeps shaking making it hard to find the off switch.
Or how about the Puzzle Alarm that fires four puzzle pieces into the air. You have to retrieve them and replace them properly to get the alarm to stop. The Kuku Alarm, however, simply crows and lays eggs and won’t stop until you replace the eggs.
Need something more dramatic? How about the Danger Bomb Alarm where you have to connect red, blue and yellow cables in the correct order otherwise a deafening explosion is heard. The Police Novelty Alarm flashes lights and yells at you to get up while the Drill Sergeant Alarm orders you out of bed while playing reveille.
Keeping with the military theme there’s the Sonic Hand Grenade Alarm. A member of the family pulls the pin and lobs the grenade into your room. After ten seconds it goes off with a piercing noise. To stop it, you have to get up and find the person so the pin can be put back in.
And the list goes on. People love to tinker and the alarm clock offers an untold number of ways to get us out of bed.
