Most of us have a love-hate relationship with our alarm clocks. But imagine one that could only ring at a single time, every single day, with no way to change it. And imagine that time was 4 o'clock in the morning.
That clock really existed, but it's often described as the world's first alarm clock, which isn't quite right. It was the first American alarm clock, built in 1787 by Levi Hutchins of Concord, New Hampshire, for himself. People had been building alarm devices for more than 2,000 years before that. Hutchins's clock simply had one fixed setting: 4 a.m.
The Clockmaker Who Rose Before Dawn
Hutchins was born in 1761 in Harvard, Massachusetts. As a teenager during the Revolutionary War, he served as a fifer under his father's command and later enlisted in the Continental Army.
After the war, he and his brother Abel trained as apprentices to a clockmaker, then set up their own shop on Main Street in Concord. In 1787, Levi built his alarm clock. It sat in a wooden cabinet about 29 inches tall with mirrored doors, and an extra gear rang an attached bell at 4 a.m. to wake him for work.
He made it only for himself, to get up for his job. He went on to make brass clocks, surveying compasses, and other precision instruments, and he lived to be 93.
Alarms Are Much Older
Long before Hutchins, people found clever ways to wake up on time. The Greek philosopher Plato was said to own a large water clock with an alarm signal, possibly to announce his lectures at dawn.
The Greek engineer Ctesibius built water clocks with alarm systems that could drop pebbles on a gong or blow trumpets at set times. In 1235, a huge water-powered alarm clock in Baghdad announced the hours of prayer day and night. In China, inventors built striking clocks as early as the 700s.
When You Could Finally Choose the Time
The big leap came in 1847, when French inventor Antoine Redier became the first to patent an adjustable mechanical alarm clock. At last, people could pick their own wake-up time. It was a small change that made a big difference to millions of sleepers.
During the Industrial Revolution, when alarm clocks were neither cheap nor reliable, workers in Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, and elsewhere paid a knocker-up to wake them. These early risers tapped on windows with long sticks. One famous 1931 photograph shows a London woman named Mary Smith using a pea-shooter to rattle her clients' windows. The job lingered in parts of England until the early 1970s.
The Mystery of the 9-Minute Snooze
Alarm clocks kept evolving, and in 1956 General Electric-Telechron released the Snooz-Alarm, the first with a snooze button. Its snooze lasted nine minutes.
Why nine? Because it was mechanical, the snooze ran on gears. Designers couldn't get the gear teeth to line up for exactly 10 minutes, so they had to choose between a bit over nine minutes or a bit over 10, which was considered too long. Nine minutes stuck, and it carried over to digital clocks and even phones.
So the next time you hit snooze, spare a thought for Levi Hutchins. He had no snooze button and no choice of hour, just a bell ringing at 4 a.m. Suddenly, 6:30 doesn't sound so bad.
