Knocker Up
Quora
Even before the days of alarm clocks, people still needed to get to work on time. Enter the knocker up, or the human equivalent of an alarm clock. Knocker-ups were hired to wake up people that needed to go to work. At first, they’d go to your door, but after a while this way of waking people up became inefficient.
So to fix this problem knocker ups would tap on people’s windows, typically using a long stick to reach the apartments that were higher up in the buildings. In some parts of England, knocker ups managed to remarkably stay in demand into the 1970s.
Lancashire Mining Museum
Knocker ups, sometimes referred to as “knocker-uppers,” became a popular job during the First Industrial Revolution, when many people started to work at factories and needed to arrive on time and at the same time. It can be said that this was likely the world’s first introduction to the 9 a.m.- 5 p.m. work schedule.
One odd tale involved London’s famed knocker-upper Mary Smith. She became a national sensation after a newspaper photograph showed her using a peashooter to wake people up. She charged her clients sixpence a week for her services, and her daughter followed in her footsteps and took over the family business once Smith stopped working.
