Knocker upper - Human Alarm
Imagine it’s the late 1800s.
You’re living in the middle class neighborhoods of Britain, and you need to make it on time for work in the morning.
However, alarm clocks of the time—or their equivalent—are insanely unreliable and not cheap at all.
So, what do you do?
Hire a knocker-upper of course.
Knocker-uppers were a profession that existed between the Industrial Revolution and mid-1920s.
Their job? To rouse sleeping people in the morning to make sure they're on time for work.
Knocker-uppers usually used batons or long bamboo sticks to knock on people’s bedroom windows in order to wake them up in the mornings.
Knocker uppers would sometimes also use ‘snuffer outers’ (these names are sounding fairly obvious) to extinguish streetlights that were lit at dusk and needed to be put out at dawn.
Some knocker-uppers even used pea shooters to wake people up, blowing peas at windows in order to make enough noise to wake someone up.
They would be paid a few pence each week and wouldn’t leave their client’s windows until they were sure they were awake.
The job was usually done by elderly men and women—but sometimes police officers on duty would also do the job on their morning shifts for extra pay.
It’s interesting to think that less than 200 years ago, there was an entire job dedicated to waking people up.
Luckily, you can easily hit snooze on your phones nowadays—it’d be harder to snooze a real life person.
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