Human beings are temporal creatures. We move, and live, and breathe subject to time constraints. We depend on time to know when to wake up or go to sleep, to make appointments and hold events, and to finish the tasks for the day. We have schedules which we try to keep, important dates to remember, and goals we want to achieve before or upon reaching a certain age.
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During the Industrial Revolution in Britain and Ireland, time was such a luxury for many people. People’s livelihoods were dependent on whether they were able to get up on time and go to work on time, otherwise, they would have to find some other means of surviving. But not everybody had the resources to buy clocks or servants to wake them up. So, instead, they relied on the “knocker-uppers”. Essentially, these were people whose job it was to wake other people up, like human alarm clocks.
Though this may be considered as resourceful or even ingenious by some, taking advantage of the opportunity that the circumstances had presented, the economist Helen Dendy had despised the profession and saw it as mere residual labor, something that doesn’t add value to the economy as a whole. Later on, knocker-uppers were replaced by alarm clocks, but some had stayed active and working as late as 1960.
(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Source: neatorama