Last year, I visited Schramberg, an idyllic little town in the Black Forest. I was taken there by my old friend and former colleague from my SAP days, Mark Finnern,, who was born and raised there and had returned after almost three decades in the USA. It was also personal for me, because my late grandmother, born in 1920, had spent several years there during the Second World War and worked at Junghans.

Junghans was founded in 1861 by merchant Erhard Junghans and grew to become the world’s largest watch manufacturer at its peak, with 3,000 employees. Alarm clocks were manufactured there from 1870 onwards, based on the American model. And yes, my grandmother was probably a so-called alarm clock girl, who assembled alarm clocks day in and day out for almost five years, and probably also other precision mechanical objects that were important for the war effort.

Alarm clocks are something we take for granted today, even if they no longer come in the form of mechanical watches. Nowadays, most people rely on the alarm function on their smartphones. But back then, it was a revolution, because how else could you wake up in time to get to work?

Well, it turns out that back then there was an entire profession dedicated to waking people up at their desired times. Knocker-ups, or knocker-uppers, went from house to house and knocked on windows at specified times with short or long poles, or with peas shot from a blowpipe, to wake up the sleeping people. This service, which was offered mainly in England and Ireland, but also in other countries, mostly by older people but also by police officers for a fee, began during the Industrial Revolution and was still widespread in isolated cases until the 1970s.

It offered women in particular the opportunity to be financially independent. Mary Smith, one of London’s most famous knocker-uppers, charged six pence a week for this service in 1930, which is equivalent to around £2.51 or €2.9 today. Starting at 2:30 in the morning, she would begin her rounds with the first people to be woken up, regardless of the season or weather. She had an average of 80 clients in her career, whom she had to wake up reliably every day.

While mechanical clocks and alarm clocks were still unaffordable for the general population at the beginning of the industrial revolution, they became affordable for everyone at the latest with the spread of cheap mechanical alarm clocks such as those made by Junghans. And with that, this profession slowly died out.