The philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford argued that the origin of modern industrial machines goes back further than the Industrial Revolution and Renaissance, all the way back to the regimented and time-based lives of medieval monks. Knocker uppers seem like a direct obvious example of this phenomenon of humans as proto machines.
As a funny personal note: one of my ancestors actually had the last name (Polish budzik) translated as “alarm clock,” which I assume means they had a similar sort of job as knocker uppers. I couldn’t find any equivalent last names in English though.
>had the last name (Polish budzik) translated as “alarm clock,” which
To add to your personal note, this is the modern translation, etymologically this is more like "the one doing the waking" (similarly to how English "computer" used to describe a person).
Yeah I assumed it was more of a description for a person, not a reference to the device. I'm not sure there were even alarm clocks in rural Poland at the time.
IIRC a lot of words in French also work this way: simple translations today, but with more elaborate historical etymologies.
"Elizabeth Ruth Naomi Belville (5 March 1854 – 7 December 1943), also known as the Greenwich Time Lady, was a businesswoman from London. She, her mother Maria Elizabeth, and her father John Henry, sold people the time. This was done by setting Belville's watch to Greenwich Mean Time, as shown by the Greenwich clock, each day and then "selling" people the time by letting them look at the watch and adjust theirs"
At this week’s dotAI conference, Ines Montani (who works on the SpaCy project) highlighted this ex-job as a warning to AI builders, so that they do not work on systems that have no future, because better and cheaper alarm clocks (for knocker-uppers) are coming.
In particular, she saw chatbots as being an inefficient user interface that would eventually be replaced by better integration between assistants and conventional UI.
The last time I read about this I kept wondering how many times the person accidentally broke a window pane with the big long stick. Some of the houses were already 80+ years old at that point, and I've lived in houses with original window glass from pre-1900 - just single pane, wavy, very thin glass. You could breathe on them wrong and break a pane. I'd never have trusted myself to with a 3 meter long stick to poke up at a 2nd story window pane loud enough to wake someone up but not so hard as to break a thin windowpane...
Interestingly they used to attach a sponge to the end. You might think that was because it doesn’t break the glass, but really it was to ensure the nearby houses don’t get woken up for free!
My ag coop magazine had a recent article on how pre-mechanisation (some places here, into the 1950s) agriculture worked: the tl;dr is no private life under strict hierarchy for 12+ hour days, so it's no wonder they'd run off to the city to get factory jobs instead.
One pull quote was a 1920s era law: "Servants and agricultural workers must be given, every other Sunday, at least 4 hours off"
this is a fascinating delve into the rich tapestry of british history and tradition spanning the ages, and i think it merits preservation at some level.
however as an American i nearly dropped a pot of coffee hearing my wife shout something about "knocking up charles dickens" from across the kitchen in front of our kids..
A hangover from this, mid-late 90’s boarding school in the U.K., one of the fags (household duties for first and second years - one-on-one fagging no longer officially existed, but did) was knocking up. Just comprised walking the corridors and banging on everyone’s doors at 7:00-7:15 (seniors later, head of house last), as the bells weren’t audible in much of the house.
It was a doss fag - by mutual agreement we came to the arrangement that whoever was on milk would also do the knocking up, as everyone got mandatory milk at the same time anyway, so ironically, whoever was on knocking up used to get to lie in for the week.
Ah pledging/hazing, a double edged sword. A possibility for camaraderie and mentorship which is often misused for abusive and degrading activities. I went through pledging/hazing in a college fraternity in the US and it was mostly harmless if immature and crass, but for activities or challenges involving alcohol I could see it easy to go overboard especially at fraternities with a more macho/party reputation or with the wrong people involved.
They were probably too expensive, or not sufficiently reliable.
> With the spread of electricity and affordable alarm clocks, however, knocking up had died out in most places by the 1940s and 1950s.
> Yet it still continued in some pockets of industrial England until the early 1970s, immortalised in songs by the likes of folk singer-song writer Mike Canavan.
I was trying to find the Simpsons clip where Lisa borrows the Native American technique for pre-dawn ambush: drink so much water that your bladder wakes you up early!
The article said they usually had inverted sleep schedules and they woke people who had odd or irregular shifts. Staying up all night was probably the best option for the work
The philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford argued that the origin of modern industrial machines goes back further than the Industrial Revolution and Renaissance, all the way back to the regimented and time-based lives of medieval monks. Knocker uppers seem like a direct obvious example of this phenomenon of humans as proto machines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford
https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.psu.edu/dist/f/153578/fi...
As a funny personal note: one of my ancestors actually had the last name (Polish budzik) translated as “alarm clock,” which I assume means they had a similar sort of job as knocker uppers. I couldn’t find any equivalent last names in English though.
>had the last name (Polish budzik) translated as “alarm clock,” which
To add to your personal note, this is the modern translation, etymologically this is more like "the one doing the waking" (similarly to how English "computer" used to describe a person).
Yeah I assumed it was more of a description for a person, not a reference to the device. I'm not sure there were even alarm clocks in rural Poland at the time.
IIRC a lot of words in French also work this way: simple translations today, but with more elaborate historical etymologies.
A common surname in South Africa is Klopper, literally Knocker. Probably similar origin.
Time related:
"Elizabeth Ruth Naomi Belville (5 March 1854 – 7 December 1943), also known as the Greenwich Time Lady, was a businesswoman from London. She, her mother Maria Elizabeth, and her father John Henry, sold people the time. This was done by setting Belville's watch to Greenwich Mean Time, as shown by the Greenwich clock, each day and then "selling" people the time by letting them look at the watch and adjust theirs"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Belville#History
At this week’s dotAI conference, Ines Montani (who works on the SpaCy project) highlighted this ex-job as a warning to AI builders, so that they do not work on systems that have no future, because better and cheaper alarm clocks (for knocker-uppers) are coming.
In particular, she saw chatbots as being an inefficient user interface that would eventually be replaced by better integration between assistants and conventional UI.
The last time I read about this I kept wondering how many times the person accidentally broke a window pane with the big long stick. Some of the houses were already 80+ years old at that point, and I've lived in houses with original window glass from pre-1900 - just single pane, wavy, very thin glass. You could breathe on them wrong and break a pane. I'd never have trusted myself to with a 3 meter long stick to poke up at a 2nd story window pane loud enough to wake someone up but not so hard as to break a thin windowpane...
Interestingly they used to attach a sponge to the end. You might think that was because it doesn’t break the glass, but really it was to ensure the nearby houses don’t get woken up for free!
Interesting solution to limit to one device or household.
He seems quite gentle in the video, he uses the windowsill as support and just vibrate the thin stick a bit.
The pea shooter method looks quite fun :)
Lazy Edwardian industrial workers demanding 8 hours sleep after 16 hours work!
"Oooohh we used to dream of living in a corridor..." - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
My ag coop magazine had a recent article on how pre-mechanisation (some places here, into the 1950s) agriculture worked: the tl;dr is no private life under strict hierarchy for 12+ hour days, so it's no wonder they'd run off to the city to get factory jobs instead.
One pull quote was a 1920s era law: "Servants and agricultural workers must be given, every other Sunday, at least 4 hours off"
this is a fascinating delve into the rich tapestry of british history and tradition spanning the ages, and i think it merits preservation at some level.
however as an American i nearly dropped a pot of coffee hearing my wife shout something about "knocking up charles dickens" from across the kitchen in front of our kids..
A hangover from this, mid-late 90’s boarding school in the U.K., one of the fags (household duties for first and second years - one-on-one fagging no longer officially existed, but did) was knocking up. Just comprised walking the corridors and banging on everyone’s doors at 7:00-7:15 (seniors later, head of house last), as the bells weren’t audible in much of the house.
It was a doss fag - by mutual agreement we came to the arrangement that whoever was on milk would also do the knocking up, as everyone got mandatory milk at the same time anyway, so ironically, whoever was on knocking up used to get to lie in for the week.
Gotta love british boarding school jargon. In the 90s no less! Sounds like 18th century.
Ah pledging/hazing, a double edged sword. A possibility for camaraderie and mentorship which is often misused for abusive and degrading activities. I went through pledging/hazing in a college fraternity in the US and it was mostly harmless if immature and crass, but for activities or challenges involving alcohol I could see it easy to go overboard especially at fraternities with a more macho/party reputation or with the wrong people involved.
I find it fascinating that I don’t understand a sentence of this.
In this case 'fag' seems to follow the definition: an English public-school boy who acts as servant to an older schoolmate
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fag
Something happened around 7:00-7:15, of that we can be sure.
Recommend Roald Dahl's "Boy" for a fascinating glimpse.
The waker uppers are up all night. Were there no alarm clocks at all? Can't a grandfather clock wake the waker upper?
They were probably too expensive, or not sufficiently reliable.
> With the spread of electricity and affordable alarm clocks, however, knocking up had died out in most places by the 1940s and 1950s.
> Yet it still continued in some pockets of industrial England until the early 1970s, immortalised in songs by the likes of folk singer-song writer Mike Canavan.
The reason for that isn't clear.
I was trying to find the Simpsons clip where Lisa borrows the Native American technique for pre-dawn ambush: drink so much water that your bladder wakes you up early!
The article said they usually had inverted sleep schedules and they woke people who had odd or irregular shifts. Staying up all night was probably the best option for the work
Clocks were expensive.
My mom used to do this with a spray bottle.
I’m glad the subtitle was included. “Knocker upper” has a very different meaning to me.
They didn’t come from a knocking shop.