The fact that nowadays we tend to take the opportunity on weekends to sleep in is "an indication that people need to make more time for sleep during the week by going to sleep earlier at night, but we don't do this," she said. (Some knocker-uppers even used straws through which they would shoot peas at their clients' windows.) These human timekeepers were gradually replaced by the spread of cheap alarm clocks in the 1930s and 1940s - the precursors to those we know today.īut is our modern-day dependence on alarms actually a good thing? Jackson isn't so sure. In 1800s Britain, wealthier families would also employ knocker-uppers - people armed with long sticks they used to tap incessantly on someone's window until they were roused. "There's almost a sense of competitiveness that underpins this: The earlier you got out of bed, the more God had favored you with physical strengths." Peashootersīut by the 1600s and into the 1700s, self-reliance for waking probably became less crucial with the spread of the first domestic alarm clocks, known as lantern clocks, driven by internal weights that would strike a bell as an alarm. "Waking up in a scheduled way was seen to be a sign of health and good ethics," Handley said. Research on early modern Britain shows that during this era, the morning hours were seen as a spiritual time, when one's closeness to God could be demonstrated by waking up at a scheduled time to pray. Handley thinks that historically, people may also have been more personally motivated to wake up at a particular hour. Church bells also functioned as a type of early alarm clock, she said. The sounds of roosters crowing and mooing cows waiting to be milked would have interrupted people's slumber. "For a society that was overwhelmingly agriculture before the Industrial Revolution, noises of nature were probably really important things," she said. "It's hard to imagine now a world where your patterns of sleeping and waking up again were directly influenced by the setting and rising of the sun," Handley told Live Science.Īnother simple, but notable fact is that the people of yore had no way of soundproofing their houses against the noises of the outside world, like we do today, Handley added. But it's possible that this orientation also enabled people to wake with the sun's rays. Their reasoning was partly religious, because the east was believed to be the direction from which Jesus would come during his resurrection, she said. In her research on Britain's historical sleeping practices, Sasha Handley, a senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, has discovered that people during this Christian era would often orientate their beds toward the east - where the sun rose. In an era before alarms, Jackson says it's probable that this is how people woke up, cued by the accumulated hours of sleep, paired with the rays of the rising sun. This process is also affected by light and dark, meaning that periods of alertness and sleepiness usually correspond with morning light and nighttime darkness, respectively. Overlaying this, the circadian rhythm - also controlled by cells in the hypothalamus - is a parallel process that regulates phases of sleepiness and alertness over the course of a day.
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