The alarm goes off. Your hand reaches out, finds the big button on top, and the room goes quiet again. Ah, just a few more minutes. The snooze button may be the most beloved and most guilty part of the morning routine. But it hasn't always been around.
The snooze button was introduced in 1956 on a General Electric-Telechron alarm clock called the Snooz-Alarm. It silenced the alarm and let it ring again a few minutes later, so people could stay in bed a little longer without oversleeping. Its snooze lasted 9 minutes, and that number stuck around for decades.
Before Alarm Clocks, There Were Knocker-Ups
Waking up on time has always been a challenge. The first American alarm clock was made in 1787 by Levi Hutchins of Concord, New Hampshire. He built it only for himself, and it could ring at just one time: 4 a.m., to get him up for work. In 1847, French inventor Antoine Redier patented the first adjustable mechanical alarm clock.
Even then, clocks were not cheap or reliable for everyone. During the Industrial Revolution in Britain and elsewhere, people paid a knocker-up a few pennies a week to wake them. These early risers tapped on doors with sticks or reached upper windows with long poles. In a famous 1931 photo, a London woman named Mary Smith wakes her customers by shooting dried peas at their windows. Many knocker-ups slept during the day, so they didn't need waking themselves.
The Mystery of the 9 Minutes
Why 9 minutes and not a nice round 10? The answer is mechanical. The 1956 Snooz-Alarm used gears to time the snooze, and designers had to work with standard gear setups. Getting the gear teeth to line up for exactly 10 minutes wasn't possible.
That left two choices: a little over 9 minutes, or a bit more than 10. Ten-plus was considered too long, so 9 minutes it was.
The habit stuck. The 9-minute snooze carried over to electronic alarm clocks and later to phone alarm apps. For years, iPhones had a fixed 9-minute snooze, while many Android phones let people choose their own.
Snooze by Any Other Name
On some clocks, the button is labeled drowse instead of snooze, which means pretty much the same thing. Either way, it keeps going off every few minutes until you finally switch the alarm off for good. Some phone apps offer another option: you can set several alarms in a row, so as soon as you switch one off, the next is already waiting a few minutes later.
Some modern alarm clocks get even cleverer. They can sense when a sleeper is in a lighter stage of sleep and try not to wake someone who's deeply asleep, since that can leave a person feeling tired even after a full night's rest. Others wake you with light, vibration, or nature sounds like rain and waves.
A Small Button With a Big Fan Club
For older clock radios, a power outage could reset the time to midnight and wipe out the alarm completely. Newer models usually have a backup battery to prevent that kind of oversleeping disaster.
So the next time you reach for that snooze button, you can thank a few clever engineers from the 1950s and their stubborn gears. Enjoy your 9 minutes. You've earned them.
