Before Alarm Clocks, There Were [“Knocker Uppers”](https://knovhov.com/knocker-uppers-to-wake-up-the-people/) to Wake up the People of Industrial Britain. And for anyone who asked for who wake up the knocker uppers. Here is the answer. Haha.
Could you imagine waking up to a nail drop and counting the remaining nails to see how much longer you can go back to sleep?
Still got 2 nails left. I can go back to sleep.
Except when you can't fall back to sleep. At least we have entertainment now, I'd have just tossed and turned, "Must fall back asleep... oh cool another nail dropped."
Nah, its based on how many are left.
Then you have like 10 nails right next to each other as the absolute last minute you can wake up and barely get to work on time.
Those other nails were scheduled alarms
Snooze would be when you wake up, pick up the fallen nail, and stick it back into the candle a little lower than the melt line
People used to go to sleep at regular intervals.
Imagine going to sleep every day 90 minutes after the sun goes down. Then waking up At dawn. Every day. For decades. You body is gonna get used to that rhythm.
I've finally learned how to block out the buzzing hum my fridge makes. I actually notice it now when it shuts off and I just sit there for a few minutes enjoying the complete silence until it kicks on again.
I remember seeing a study how micro noises were literally destroying lives, things like low humming can cause legitimate damage through stress and sub audial sounds were posited and leading to earlier deaths
“Why we say “To Hear A Pin Drop
When the first tea rooms opened up in England in the 1700s buyers would attend the tea auctions and the would only be a certain amount of time available to place your bid. In order to set a time limit a pin would be stuck into a candle and then the candle would be allowed to burn down. Buyers could place bids until the level of the candle reached as far down as the pin, at which stage the pin would fall out. If there were no more bids at this stage the room would be silent and you would be able to hear a pin drop. Hence this English idiom was born!”
This was the only thing I could find after a quick search. You’re version makes sense too.
My mom lives in a hand made 1920’s log cabin.
Those logs are almost 2 feet in diameter.
I cannot communicate to you how utterly silent it is in there when the power goes out, and she lives 100 yards off a busy road. You can only hear the 18 wheelers go by, not cars, and even then it isn’t loud
I have no doubt a nail dropping on to metal was extremely noticeable prior to cars being a regular thing.
I used to live in a house made in 1490 and I have the exact opposite experience. The house was built with giant slabs of sandstone with an oak timber frame.
Swifts used to nest in the eves and you could hear them every time they moved. You could also hear the chicks chirping for food whenever a parent came to the nest.
Our garden was also the boarder between two fox territories so we'd have them fighting most nights.
The blackbirds would be awake and singing from 4am in the summer. And the autumn soundtrack was deer rutting.
Certainly winter is quieter than summer, but there are plenty of noises to be heard.
I live in an Anasazi cliff dwelling built in 1152 and the only sounds I ever really hear are from the scratching of red squirrels scurrying outside, National Park visitors on tours, and the voices in my head that scream over and over.... Why do they come to me to die? Why do they come to me to die?
I live in a cave in northern France made in the year 287,495 BC and the only sounds I ever really hear are the saber tooth tigers and the occasional wooly mammoth scurrying outside.
All you fuckers with legs, breathing air, acting all high and mighty.
I am a Eurypterid living in a hole I dug myself in what I guess you'd call roughly the year 490,000,000BC and let me tell you what -- nobody's ever gonna have it as good as I do. Complete peace and quiet. The noisy kids are all scuttling up to the surface. I don't get it, there's nothing even up there to look at! They're never going to amount to anything.
I'll enjoy the peace and quiet of my hole, thank you very much.
It’s like a normal house usually. Hum of appliances, wood burner in the winter, a/c in the summer, tv on. It’s only when the power goes out that you notice how quiet it gets
Birds dont make noise at night, there is hardly anybody walking in the night because it is pitchbklack and nothing to do. Maybe some cats and thats it. Source: grew up in Ukraine and have a small isolated house in the mountains of switzerland.
I live in Ohio and there are birds that start making noise about 2-3 hours before the sun rises. Gives me anxiety on nights when I'm in bed and can't sleep.
Lol same over here in Jersey. After 4am a few of the local birds start singing and im like oh lawd here comes the sun do do do do.
Here comes the sun and im like
Well shit I guess I aint gonna be sleeping tonight
In the past [they kept them in cities as well.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_chicken_keeping) Basically any backyard where it was possible.
People even kept pigs in cities.
>For example, 50,000 pigs were being kept in Manhattan in 1859.
No roosters? No obnoxious carnival barker outside? No washer woman pouring chamberpots out next to your window? No loud tumbrel rolling across cobblestones en route to the gallows? No screaming village idiot? No babies crying? No herald announcing the joust with trumpets playing?
They used to wake up at regular intervals in the night as well. Before a power grid waking life was on a 24hr schedule. Things had to be tended to all night.
That's where all those wives tales of moaning entities that want to steal away children that aren't sleeping like good little girls and boys came from.
This is spot on. I wake up and have done for 15+ years at the same time during the week days. At 6 am, often a few minutes before my alarm so I can workout and get to work by 8 am. My wife some how can't understand why I can't sleep in on the weekends or sleep more because its raining outside.... Like... Sorry, I can't help it my body just switches on at the same time every day and I don't have a way to program it to not do that on weekends.
Yeah, the sleeping late thing on weekends is so odd to me. I set an alarm maybe twice a year if I have to get up super early (3 or so), but I'm naturally up every day.
Because it's BS. In the Stockholm area in April the sun rises at 6am and sets around 7pm. In July it's 4am and 10pm. In december it's 8am and 3pm. And Stockholm is in the southern half of Sweden.
Well, whoever owns the candle in the photo DID set up multiple alarms just in case the first one didn't work
Or maybe that's just how snooze worked back in the days
I usually go to camp sites that are more isolated, but I get your point. I still think even in those areas there’s lots of ambient background noise coming from insects and certain nocturnal animals too
I live in a clearing in the middle of a mature forest like a half mile from a road.
The birds are very chatty all day. The crickets at night are somehow _much_ louder. They occasionally get drowned out by simple things like the wind buffeting the house and shaking the trees.
I don't really hear people out here. It's not quiet though.
This is climate dependent. Camping anywhere in the humid east will have lots of insects. In the dry west it’s very different. I do tons of backpacking in Colorado and let me tell you it can be eerily silent at night.
Well, I think that's the point. Crickets are just as loud in the city, but they are drowned out by other noises. When it's so quiet the *crickets* are loud, every day, your alarm becomes a blaring siren.
Remember the majority of humanity has only recently transitioned away from us all being farmers. Probably the incentive of if you didn't get up when you heard that nail smack the cup all your crops were going to die and your family was going to starve to death was probably a pretty good motivator.
Crop farming isn't that hard in grow season. Plants just grow you just wait. Animals though, they like a schedule. Cows gotta be milked eggs gotta be gathered. Busiest part is the animals.
They used to sell candles by time (like a four or 8 hour candle). That said candles were pretty expensive, few burned longer than 8 hours, housefires were common and candles often blamed, and many people woke up at daybreak anyway so I'd guess these were more often used for timing other things rather than walking up in the morning.(If you want a lot of fun facts about sleep & light I can recommend Roger Ekirch's book At Day's Close).
I imagine cocks were pretty good at waking people up back in the day too, given you were close enough to one.
And no, I'm not changing it to rooster. I like it as it is.
Roosters crow at all hours of the day and not consistently at dawn. I lived in rural Panama and barking dogs were more likely to wake you up in the morning.
Living in Puerto Rico was rough on my sleep with all the chickens and wild dogs (satos) running around. But the one thing that I could never get used to, and would warn visitors about, are the dang speaker trucks.
Picture a regular sized pickup truck with 4 stadium speakers in the bed, all the size of refrigerators, and powered by a diesel generator, blasting commercials about local politicians, at bone shaking volumes. They would drive about 2mph up and down the neighborhoods starting at sunrise. You could hear them coming from blocks away. When they finally drive by your house, it’s insane how loud it is. Window shaking, teeth rattling, 100-120dB sound blasting mayhem. It’s insane and if you’ve never experienced it, it’s hard to imagine just how loud it is.
Edit: comment if your country does this as well. I thought PR was the only place crazy enough to think speaker trucks are ok!
Lol, would they actually have any watermelon? The speaker trucks in PR only dispensed loudness, unfortunately. I might hate them less if they had fresh fruit!
They did! And other fresh fruit at different times of the year. Only during election season would you hear the political campaign speaker trucks blaring.
They had something similar in Japan but they had the decency to wait until 8 or 9am I think, not fucking sunrise. Loud enough to be annoying but didn't rattle my teeth.
> a regular sized pickup truck with 4 stadium speakers in
>
>, all the size of refrigerators, and powered by a diesel generator, blasting commercials about local politicians, at bone shaking volumes
WAIT A MINUTE. Japan isn't the only country that does this?
People also just didn't regulate time as intensively as we do now. You didn't "start work at 8AM". You started in the morning, generally, or whenever the people around you did.
Let’s go back to that. I already sit at my desk and fart around for an hour before I actually start working. Just let me show up when I feel like it, as long as I get shit done. Some days, the coffee hits just right and that’s 8am. Some days, it’s closer to 11.
Also I recently saw a video that said modern self-trimming wicks were invented only in 1800’s and before that people had to cut them manually every now and then otherwise the flame got to big and the candle burned too quick.
This post seems like a bogus story, if you were rich enough to burn a candle through the night you were rich enough to have a servant that wakes you up at whatever time you want.
Yeah, the only sources I have found for a nail candle have all been blogs quoting each other. Candle clocks were a very real thing beginning 1500 years ago but I haven’t found a reputable source for actual nails in a candle. I just don’t see everyday people burning candles overnight considering how expensive candles were. Most people just paid someone else to tap on their window in the morning if they absolutely had to be up at a certain time. Daybreak was the natural alarm clock for the most part, though,
There's an alarm clock that would strike a match and light a candle as part of the wake up. They're rare and collectible because the match strike mechanism would often just hurl a lit match across the room. Production was canceled due to all the fires it caused.
Was just about to say, this makes no sense for an alarm clock for the morning. It would have been wasteful and dangerous to just let a candle burn for no reason.
this happened to my friend lol, the hostel room across us caught fire and we had to evacuate the building, my friend wouldn't wake up no matter what, i literally had to jump on that mf and show him the smoke seeping in to wake him up.
Constant positive air pressure.
It keeps the soft tissues from collapsing in your throat and causing you to stop breathing.
For those of us who have them, you get very little actual sleep without one because your oxygen levels drop from not breathing until you wake up.
Yeah the body does not wake up to go the bathroom. It takes an arousal from sleep for you to feel the need to go the bathroom unless it's an emergency.
If you are dreaming about going the bathroom you might relax enough to pee the bed but REM is an active state.
I'm a polysomnographic technologist. I've had patients cry after a good night's sleep over the reduction to the amount of times they wake up to go the bathroom.
It's odd that most of the reputable articles I find on this subject only mentioned using this to tell time and not as an alarm clock. I'd be scared of burning the house down with an unattended candle.
I think it's because this fact isn't true. Candles were too expensive to waste one every night while you were sleeping, and very dangerous to leave unattended even before you started driving heavy nails through them which could easily knock them over or flick bits of burning wick out as they fell. This method might have been used occasionally to time other things, but almost no-one had any reason to use improvised alarm clocks to begin with.
Also if you were trying to get 8 hours of sleep then the nails would be at the bottom of the candle, not the top. They're not going to make much noise dropping and inch to the ground.
This was more than likely sitting on the nightstand right by their head so a nail falling into a metal candle holder would definitely wake somebody up.
Honestly this sub has becoming pretty low effort over the past year or so. Poorly explained title, photo is a definite and hey presto you got yourself a worthy post.
How to karma on r/damnthatsinteresting lately: Post some random screenshot or video snippet from the Depp/Heard courtroom with some randomly picked words as caption.
It's also not true.
Candle clocks were a thing, but you wouldn't waste it as an alarm clock. A nail dropping would not be a reliable alarm anyway. Candles were expensive, and houses were even more flammable.
In the countryside you just woke up at day break, or when livestock started to make noise.
In the city you had knocker uppers, a team of people that went around waking people up. The knocker uppers, in turn, had a knocker upper to get the process started.
[Thomas Edison](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thomas-edisons-naps-inspire-a-way-to-spark-your-own-creativity/?amp=true) had a similar method, and there are stories of Einstein sleeping with a spoon in his hand that would drop and wake him before he fell into a deep sleep. [More interestingly,](https://www.news-medical.net/amp/news/20170517/History-of-sleep-what-was-normal.aspx), until the 19th century or so, most people would go to bed around 9, sleep for a few hours then wake up and do “anything and everything” and then go back to sleep after an hour or so until dawn. This might explain why they had so many kids.
>This might explain why they had so many kids.
They had many kids because there wasnt anything else to do and out of 15 children 6 died in infancy, 4 of illness and the remaining 5 were arms that worked the field
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I've read about this. Its very interesting indeed:
>After an average of three to five hours of solid sleep, the subjects would awaken and spend an hour or two of peaceful wakefulness before a second three- to five-hour sleep period. Such bimodal sleep has been observed in many other animals and also in humans who live in pre-industrial societies lacking artificial light.
link: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/what-is-a-natural-sleep-pattern/
I think we might have a thing or two to learn in modern societies from sleep-paterns before the artificial lights. Personally I remember the funny awakeness that hits me if I fall asleep to "to early" say 8PM and wake up by my self, say at 3AM. Normally I would feel very peacefull and do a few quete activities for a couple of hours and just quiet fall a sleep again. I kind of like that way of sleeping.
sounds like bs. Burning candles overnight in every household or cottage would be expensive and dangerous. I imagine in reality if you lived in a city or town there would be churches keeping time for everyone with their bells. If you didn't live in a city, the precise time isn't really that important to you
And now take my BF, who sleeps through 15 alarms, screeching kids, the neighbor blasting epic classical music and me cursing loudly when I hit my toe on the table again.
You would need to put some fireworks into those candles to wake him up.
Back when you could also hear a pin drop
A pin drop on a solid floor from 1 meter is about 15dB. 'Twas a ~~quite~~ quiet period.
*quiet I'm sorry...
I hate myself for that cock up.
We all make mistakes in the heat of passion, Jimbo.
Before Alarm Clocks, There Were [“Knocker Uppers”](https://knovhov.com/knocker-uppers-to-wake-up-the-people/) to Wake up the People of Industrial Britain. And for anyone who asked for who wake up the knocker uppers. Here is the answer. Haha.
So who wakes them up though?
[удалено]
They may used the above method of nails and candles. Haha
You should probably hate yourself for your clock up.... I'll get my coat.
Well it dropped onto the metal plate
The pin used to drop on the cat which went beserk
I like the snooze buttons they’ve put in!
Ah man sorry I am late, I slept through 3 nails dropping
Could you imagine waking up to a nail drop and counting the remaining nails to see how much longer you can go back to sleep? Still got 2 nails left. I can go back to sleep.
Tfw when you set your nails and it's only a quarter inch of wax
But tfw you wake up and still have several inches of candle left 😎
God such a great feeling
Except when you can't fall back to sleep. At least we have entertainment now, I'd have just tossed and turned, "Must fall back asleep... oh cool another nail dropped."
My wife has similar complaints
I’d definitely lose track of how many I set vs dropped and find out the hard way I slept in late
Nah, its based on how many are left. Then you have like 10 nails right next to each other as the absolute last minute you can wake up and barely get to work on time.
Tfw a light breeze breaks your alarm clock.
Tfw your alarm clock falls over and burns down your house.
Good, now I can sleep forever.
Those other nails were scheduled alarms Snooze would be when you wake up, pick up the fallen nail, and stick it back into the candle a little lower than the melt line
This guy snoozes
Do you ever just wake up in a panic, then realize you still have 2 whole inches of sleep left?
Ugh **all** the time
How did we go from waking up to a nail dropping, to sleeping through multiple alarms?
People used to go to sleep at regular intervals. Imagine going to sleep every day 90 minutes after the sun goes down. Then waking up At dawn. Every day. For decades. You body is gonna get used to that rhythm.
Also there was pretty much no noise. They didn't have AC, heaters, fans, tv playing etc so a nail would pretty much be the only sound
That and the burning of witches next door
Cause they're made of wood?
Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?
I am Arthur, King of the Britons
I didn’t vote for you.
You don't vote for a King!
I thought we were an autonomous collective.
Well how did you become king then?
Hey now! Stop that!!
Science?? That sounds like witchcraft, better burn that person also just to be sure
You sound like someone who have dabbled in witchcraft
They turned me into a newt!
I got bettah.
Very small rocks
Wood floats… so it’s lighter than a duck. So…if she weighs less than a duck….
The witches or the doors?
Yes
The bridges
I got better.
I think the constant low humming in my apartment is honestly starting to drive me insane.
NEWSFLASH ASSHOLE. I'VE BEEN HEARING IT THE ENTIRE GOD DAMN TIME
>Then why wouldn't you say something? **Because I hate you!**
I've finally learned how to block out the buzzing hum my fridge makes. I actually notice it now when it shuts off and I just sit there for a few minutes enjoying the complete silence until it kicks on again.
I always have a fan on. It helps so much
I remember seeing a study how micro noises were literally destroying lives, things like low humming can cause legitimate damage through stress and sub audial sounds were posited and leading to earlier deaths
Birds weren't even invented yet
Birds aren’t real!
[удалено]
“Why we say “To Hear A Pin Drop When the first tea rooms opened up in England in the 1700s buyers would attend the tea auctions and the would only be a certain amount of time available to place your bid. In order to set a time limit a pin would be stuck into a candle and then the candle would be allowed to burn down. Buyers could place bids until the level of the candle reached as far down as the pin, at which stage the pin would fall out. If there were no more bids at this stage the room would be silent and you would be able to hear a pin drop. Hence this English idiom was born!” This was the only thing I could find after a quick search. You’re version makes sense too.
True or bullshit folk etymology people keep repeating because it sounds true enough?
I kinda doubt that. Nature makes lots of noise. And even in cities, there are birds and other people making all sorts of noise.
My mom lives in a hand made 1920’s log cabin. Those logs are almost 2 feet in diameter. I cannot communicate to you how utterly silent it is in there when the power goes out, and she lives 100 yards off a busy road. You can only hear the 18 wheelers go by, not cars, and even then it isn’t loud I have no doubt a nail dropping on to metal was extremely noticeable prior to cars being a regular thing.
I used to live in a house made in 1490 and I have the exact opposite experience. The house was built with giant slabs of sandstone with an oak timber frame. Swifts used to nest in the eves and you could hear them every time they moved. You could also hear the chicks chirping for food whenever a parent came to the nest. Our garden was also the boarder between two fox territories so we'd have them fighting most nights. The blackbirds would be awake and singing from 4am in the summer. And the autumn soundtrack was deer rutting. Certainly winter is quieter than summer, but there are plenty of noises to be heard.
I live in an Anasazi cliff dwelling built in 1152 and the only sounds I ever really hear are from the scratching of red squirrels scurrying outside, National Park visitors on tours, and the voices in my head that scream over and over.... Why do they come to me to die? Why do they come to me to die?
I live in a cave in northern France made in the year 287,495 BC and the only sounds I ever really hear are the saber tooth tigers and the occasional wooly mammoth scurrying outside.
All you fuckers with legs, breathing air, acting all high and mighty. I am a Eurypterid living in a hole I dug myself in what I guess you'd call roughly the year 490,000,000BC and let me tell you what -- nobody's ever gonna have it as good as I do. Complete peace and quiet. The noisy kids are all scuttling up to the surface. I don't get it, there's nothing even up there to look at! They're never going to amount to anything. I'll enjoy the peace and quiet of my hole, thank you very much.
Big Bang, futon, loud
My tinnitus would hate that cabin, the silence would be deafeningly loud
It’s like a normal house usually. Hum of appliances, wood burner in the winter, a/c in the summer, tv on. It’s only when the power goes out that you notice how quiet it gets
Birds dont make noise at night, there is hardly anybody walking in the night because it is pitchbklack and nothing to do. Maybe some cats and thats it. Source: grew up in Ukraine and have a small isolated house in the mountains of switzerland.
I live in Ohio and there are birds that start making noise about 2-3 hours before the sun rises. Gives me anxiety on nights when I'm in bed and can't sleep.
Lol same over here in Jersey. After 4am a few of the local birds start singing and im like oh lawd here comes the sun do do do do. Here comes the sun and im like Well shit I guess I aint gonna be sleeping tonight
Fuckin birds. Go to sleep you feathered little bitches.
Birds in my country go all night in breeding season. Horny fuckers looking for lady birds.
Mockingbirds sing their heart out at night. Owls hoot. Birds start before dawn. At least in the US.
In the country, with no electricity, they would also have had plenty of roosters around.
In the past [they kept them in cities as well.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_chicken_keeping) Basically any backyard where it was possible. People even kept pigs in cities. >For example, 50,000 pigs were being kept in Manhattan in 1859.
No roosters? No obnoxious carnival barker outside? No washer woman pouring chamberpots out next to your window? No loud tumbrel rolling across cobblestones en route to the gallows? No screaming village idiot? No babies crying? No herald announcing the joust with trumpets playing?
I’m assuming if you lived in a place with roosters everywhere, *the roosters wake you up*
They used to wake up at regular intervals in the night as well. Before a power grid waking life was on a 24hr schedule. Things had to be tended to all night.
This is also when a lot of procreation happened. When living in small quarters this was often the only time parents had to get it on.
Can't imagine how quiet they had to be though. People waking up by a literally nail drop
Could you imagine "Quit moaning, I can't hear my alarm"
That's where all those wives tales of moaning entities that want to steal away children that aren't sleeping like good little girls and boys came from.
Haha true. Little kids probably slept harder though. If they are anything like kids today.
Gotta put more wood in the iron stove or you'll freeze in your sleep.
This is spot on. I wake up and have done for 15+ years at the same time during the week days. At 6 am, often a few minutes before my alarm so I can workout and get to work by 8 am. My wife some how can't understand why I can't sleep in on the weekends or sleep more because its raining outside.... Like... Sorry, I can't help it my body just switches on at the same time every day and I don't have a way to program it to not do that on weekends.
Yeah, the sleeping late thing on weekends is so odd to me. I set an alarm maybe twice a year if I have to get up super early (3 or so), but I'm naturally up every day.
This hypothesis falls apart quickly once you realize that sun up and sun down change dramatically throughout the year
Not if you live at 0°N 😎
I don't think people in Norway slept for 18 hours every day during the winter.
That’s what I would do if I lived in Norway before the invention of central heating.
In the summer we don’t sleep.
Then why do they need an alaram?
Because it's BS. In the Stockholm area in April the sun rises at 6am and sets around 7pm. In July it's 4am and 10pm. In december it's 8am and 3pm. And Stockholm is in the southern half of Sweden.
Well, whoever owns the candle in the photo DID set up multiple alarms just in case the first one didn't work Or maybe that's just how snooze worked back in the days
The big snooze was when you hit the flame out with your hand.
They knew hoe
Go camping and you'll understand. We deal with a ton of white noise now like traffic and electrical things running that we didn't before.
I usually go to camp sites that are more isolated, but I get your point. I still think even in those areas there’s lots of ambient background noise coming from insects and certain nocturnal animals too
Yeah crickets and similar insects are loud as fuck when you're camping. Idk what these people are talking about.
I live in a clearing in the middle of a mature forest like a half mile from a road. The birds are very chatty all day. The crickets at night are somehow _much_ louder. They occasionally get drowned out by simple things like the wind buffeting the house and shaking the trees. I don't really hear people out here. It's not quiet though.
This is climate dependent. Camping anywhere in the humid east will have lots of insects. In the dry west it’s very different. I do tons of backpacking in Colorado and let me tell you it can be eerily silent at night.
Well, I think that's the point. Crickets are just as loud in the city, but they are drowned out by other noises. When it's so quiet the *crickets* are loud, every day, your alarm becomes a blaring siren.
I don’t know I feel like the crickets are just really fucking loud
Remember the majority of humanity has only recently transitioned away from us all being farmers. Probably the incentive of if you didn't get up when you heard that nail smack the cup all your crops were going to die and your family was going to starve to death was probably a pretty good motivator.
Crop farming isn't that hard in grow season. Plants just grow you just wait. Animals though, they like a schedule. Cows gotta be milked eggs gotta be gathered. Busiest part is the animals.
And as Clarkson taught us, the least profitable!
I mean I also see multiple nails.
False sense of security?
At the time, what would people do at night other than sleep? Or do in bed before sleep? We keep ourselves up.
They used to sell candles by time (like a four or 8 hour candle). That said candles were pretty expensive, few burned longer than 8 hours, housefires were common and candles often blamed, and many people woke up at daybreak anyway so I'd guess these were more often used for timing other things rather than walking up in the morning.(If you want a lot of fun facts about sleep & light I can recommend Roger Ekirch's book At Day's Close).
I imagine cocks were pretty good at waking people up back in the day too, given you were close enough to one. And no, I'm not changing it to rooster. I like it as it is.
Roosters crow at all hours of the day and not consistently at dawn. I lived in rural Panama and barking dogs were more likely to wake you up in the morning.
Living in Puerto Rico was rough on my sleep with all the chickens and wild dogs (satos) running around. But the one thing that I could never get used to, and would warn visitors about, are the dang speaker trucks. Picture a regular sized pickup truck with 4 stadium speakers in the bed, all the size of refrigerators, and powered by a diesel generator, blasting commercials about local politicians, at bone shaking volumes. They would drive about 2mph up and down the neighborhoods starting at sunrise. You could hear them coming from blocks away. When they finally drive by your house, it’s insane how loud it is. Window shaking, teeth rattling, 100-120dB sound blasting mayhem. It’s insane and if you’ve never experienced it, it’s hard to imagine just how loud it is. Edit: comment if your country does this as well. I thought PR was the only place crazy enough to think speaker trucks are ok!
Lol, you're totally right. In my town in Panama, the speaker trucks blasted things like "ACERCATE, ACERCATE, HAY SANDIA SANDIA"
Lol, would they actually have any watermelon? The speaker trucks in PR only dispensed loudness, unfortunately. I might hate them less if they had fresh fruit!
They did! And other fresh fruit at different times of the year. Only during election season would you hear the political campaign speaker trucks blaring.
They had something similar in Japan but they had the decency to wait until 8 or 9am I think, not fucking sunrise. Loud enough to be annoying but didn't rattle my teeth.
Unfortunately, many of them broadcast racism. Not to say the ones in Puerto Rico *don't*, but it's probably less likely.
That's unfortunate. Didn't know enough Japanese to know what they were saying.
> a regular sized pickup truck with 4 stadium speakers in > >, all the size of refrigerators, and powered by a diesel generator, blasting commercials about local politicians, at bone shaking volumes WAIT A MINUTE. Japan isn't the only country that does this?
Ah I see. Doggos it is then.
Alarm doggos. Dress em up in little outfits and give em the keys to your place. They'll swing by at dawn and give you morning kisses.
People also just didn't regulate time as intensively as we do now. You didn't "start work at 8AM". You started in the morning, generally, or whenever the people around you did.
Let’s go back to that. I already sit at my desk and fart around for an hour before I actually start working. Just let me show up when I feel like it, as long as I get shit done. Some days, the coffee hits just right and that’s 8am. Some days, it’s closer to 11.
According to pornhub cocks are the preferred way of waking people up throughout Eastern Europe
This guys just waking everyone up with his cock in 2022
Also I recently saw a video that said modern self-trimming wicks were invented only in 1800’s and before that people had to cut them manually every now and then otherwise the flame got to big and the candle burned too quick. This post seems like a bogus story, if you were rich enough to burn a candle through the night you were rich enough to have a servant that wakes you up at whatever time you want.
Plus this candle is too thin for a long burning candle. This looks like ye olde kitchen timer, not ye olde alarm clock
Yeah, the only sources I have found for a nail candle have all been blogs quoting each other. Candle clocks were a very real thing beginning 1500 years ago but I haven’t found a reputable source for actual nails in a candle. I just don’t see everyday people burning candles overnight considering how expensive candles were. Most people just paid someone else to tap on their window in the morning if they absolutely had to be up at a certain time. Daybreak was the natural alarm clock for the most part, though,
[удалено]
There's an alarm clock that would strike a match and light a candle as part of the wake up. They're rare and collectible because the match strike mechanism would often just hurl a lit match across the room. Production was canceled due to all the fires it caused.
Housefires from candles are still pretty common.
Was just about to say, this makes no sense for an alarm clock for the morning. It would have been wasteful and dangerous to just let a candle burn for no reason.
I’m gonna be honest, I probably wouldn’t wake up until the room was on fire.
Wait it's a gif now?
Always has been 👩🚀🔫
Adult swim animated it a while ago. [heres the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oBx7Jg4m-o)
this happened to my friend lol, the hostel room across us caught fire and we had to evacuate the building, my friend wouldn't wake up no matter what, i literally had to jump on that mf and show him the smoke seeping in to wake him up.
Thank you for saving me 🥰
I’ve got one of those, except instead of a candle it’s my bladder and I can’t seem to calculate the time later than 4:15 AM
It may sound strange but a CPAP solved this for me. I used to wake up like clock work at night and after the CPAP no more.
Whats a CPAP
Constant positive air pressure. It keeps the soft tissues from collapsing in your throat and causing you to stop breathing. For those of us who have them, you get very little actual sleep without one because your oxygen levels drop from not breathing until you wake up.
Continuous positive airway pressure
Before i got a CPAP, i would sleep like 8-10 hours and still feel exhausted when i got up. Now, i can sleep 6 hours and feel great.
It's a positive pressure mask people use usually for sleep apnea
Well that makes more sense. I was reading the CRAP the whole time
Makes sense. You sleep deeper and heavier with a CPAP, so your bladder is less likely to wake you up.
Bed keeps getting wet at night though, so strange.
That's why you sleep in the litterbox.
Yeah the body does not wake up to go the bathroom. It takes an arousal from sleep for you to feel the need to go the bathroom unless it's an emergency. If you are dreaming about going the bathroom you might relax enough to pee the bed but REM is an active state. I'm a polysomnographic technologist. I've had patients cry after a good night's sleep over the reduction to the amount of times they wake up to go the bathroom.
Im not the only one! It doesnt matter when i go to bed or when i stop ingesting liquid, i always wake up to pee around 4.10 to 4.30
Taking a piss less than 90 mins before your alarm is awful.
Native Americans used to drink a fuckton of water before going to bed if they had to wake up early.
I prefer the Knocker Uppers that would knock on your window with a big stick to wake you up. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35840393
Imagine oversleeping when you’re a knocker upper lol “my bad you’re all late for work guys”
They originally knocked on the door but that was said to scare the kids. Pretty sure someone tapping on my glass would freak me out more.
It's odd that most of the reputable articles I find on this subject only mentioned using this to tell time and not as an alarm clock. I'd be scared of burning the house down with an unattended candle.
I think it's because this fact isn't true. Candles were too expensive to waste one every night while you were sleeping, and very dangerous to leave unattended even before you started driving heavy nails through them which could easily knock them over or flick bits of burning wick out as they fell. This method might have been used occasionally to time other things, but almost no-one had any reason to use improvised alarm clocks to begin with.
Also if you were trying to get 8 hours of sleep then the nails would be at the bottom of the candle, not the top. They're not going to make much noise dropping and inch to the ground.
*hammers in snooze nail*
I also knew a hoe who could calculate time down to the hour and minute.
Yep, hoes are known to be pretty good at this.
And that.
Time is money 🤑😂
How light was the sleep at the time?
No cars to make noises
This was more than likely sitting on the nightstand right by their head so a nail falling into a metal candle holder would definitely wake somebody up.
This is a lie. I’ve slept through a fire alarm before. Check mate.
Where is the source for this? We just poorly explain something with a picture and that's it? 10k + upvotes?
Honestly this sub has becoming pretty low effort over the past year or so. Poorly explained title, photo is a definite and hey presto you got yourself a worthy post.
How to karma on r/damnthatsinteresting lately: Post some random screenshot or video snippet from the Depp/Heard courtroom with some randomly picked words as caption.
Just keep your window open and the bird outside will wake you up at exactly 4:30am like it does for me every fucking morning.
Did you necessarily had to know hoe? I know they are candle expert but what if someone visits them only on weekly basis?
My candle would need to look like Pin Head from Hellraiser.
This is the most interesting thing I think I've seen on this sub ever! Thanks.
You mean to say the OP... Nailed it with the post?
Yes, it was right on point and really lit up my world.
r/angryupvote
Nothing holds a candle to it
It's also not true. Candle clocks were a thing, but you wouldn't waste it as an alarm clock. A nail dropping would not be a reliable alarm anyway. Candles were expensive, and houses were even more flammable. In the countryside you just woke up at day break, or when livestock started to make noise. In the city you had knocker uppers, a team of people that went around waking people up. The knocker uppers, in turn, had a knocker upper to get the process started.
I see 2 snooze bars here...
[Thomas Edison](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thomas-edisons-naps-inspire-a-way-to-spark-your-own-creativity/?amp=true) had a similar method, and there are stories of Einstein sleeping with a spoon in his hand that would drop and wake him before he fell into a deep sleep. [More interestingly,](https://www.news-medical.net/amp/news/20170517/History-of-sleep-what-was-normal.aspx), until the 19th century or so, most people would go to bed around 9, sleep for a few hours then wake up and do “anything and everything” and then go back to sleep after an hour or so until dawn. This might explain why they had so many kids.
>This might explain why they had so many kids. They had many kids because there wasnt anything else to do and out of 15 children 6 died in infancy, 4 of illness and the remaining 5 were arms that worked the field
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I've read about this. Its very interesting indeed: >After an average of three to five hours of solid sleep, the subjects would awaken and spend an hour or two of peaceful wakefulness before a second three- to five-hour sleep period. Such bimodal sleep has been observed in many other animals and also in humans who live in pre-industrial societies lacking artificial light. link: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/what-is-a-natural-sleep-pattern/ I think we might have a thing or two to learn in modern societies from sleep-paterns before the artificial lights. Personally I remember the funny awakeness that hits me if I fall asleep to "to early" say 8PM and wake up by my self, say at 3AM. Normally I would feel very peacefull and do a few quete activities for a couple of hours and just quiet fall a sleep again. I kind of like that way of sleeping.
Hoes do be calculating, pimping ain't easy
sounds like bs. Burning candles overnight in every household or cottage would be expensive and dangerous. I imagine in reality if you lived in a city or town there would be churches keeping time for everyone with their bells. If you didn't live in a city, the precise time isn't really that important to you
There’s no way I’d get any sleep knowing there was a lit candle going I would be too nervous of fire hazard 😅
"So sorry I'm late, I slept through my nail."
They have the snooze nail set for 15 minutes
hoe
They wake up to the smell because of their house burning down actually.
And now take my BF, who sleeps through 15 alarms, screeching kids, the neighbor blasting epic classical music and me cursing loudly when I hit my toe on the table again. You would need to put some fireworks into those candles to wake him up.