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.
Reading about world war 2 has given me a new appreciation for just how manual everything was.
It's amazing that the Allies managed 2 major amphibious landings in June 1944: Normandy was one, Saipan the other. Saipan was about a thousand miles from the nearest Allied forward base, and >3000 miles from Pearl Harbor! All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets.
> All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets.
Well they did have radios, telephones and radar as well. The fire control systems of battleships and anti-aircraft guns led to massive advances in distributed analogue computing that provided early insights into human/machine interactions as well as the beginnings of system-level architecting. The Brits during the Battle of Britain exploited telephone networks and switchboards in innovative ways to create a highly fault (bomb) tolerant decentralised command and control system that formed an early version of the sensor-to-shooter kill chains we see today.
If you've not read Most Secret War I highly recommend it. Dr R V Jones details some of the different systems involved in the Battle of Britain and it's a great book too.
I read 'The Secret War' by Brian Johnson which was based on a 1970s BBC series. I think it's an earlier version of the same thing.
Another great (although very dry) book is 'Between Human and Machine - Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics' by David A. Mindell. This goes into the fire control stuff that I mentioned, and describes how one effect of the war was to force together the different groups that were working on analogue computation.
> I think ['The Secret War' by Brian Johnson is] an earlier version of ['Most Secret War' by R V Jones]
Most Secret War is R V Jones' memoir of his personal involvement in radar, aerial navigation, aerial surveillance etc. in British military intelligence. I read it a long time ago but I don't remember it as a dry read at all - dramatic times after all.
Brian Johnson was involved in writing and producing the BBC documentary and a book. So it's not an earlier version of the same thing. The documentary is on youtube I think - a good watch, but I'd recommend reading Jones' original book.
Everyone reading this right now needs to check out this 1950s naval training video on the mechanical fire control computers of battleships: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4 For fun, before you watch, think for yourself how you'd implement addition, multiplication, squaring, etc. with only gears and other mechanisms.
Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down. People have more time to think about what they can achieve. I vaguely remember Planning for Normandy taking 2 years or something, just cause of all the resources they had to mobilize from around the world.
Contrast with today's wars, were all the real time tech in the world is producing lot of half baked outcomes.
A frequently repeated excuse for WWI germany is that Wilhelm II had expressed desire not to invade the west, but had been told by his military that it was too late to recall the trains. Apparently the guy in charge of the german army's logistics in 1914 wrote a book after the war to explain that not only could he have turned everyone back before the border had he only received a command to do so, but also included appendices with the timetables for doing so.
>Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down.
This has been a major learning in devops too. Sometimes you want the tool to go slow, at least to start, to give a chance to Ctrl-C when you realize you've made a mistake. A bad deploy that gets replicated to 10% of your fleet could be far better than one that goes to 100%.
>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.
Following that train of thought back one can go all the way to the Roman Empire which used slaves as proto machines as you call them.
>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.
Surnames are funny, I always thought we had a cool one, but apparently it just means someone that lives next to a hedge.
The "alarm clock" surname is pretty cool though if you know this factoid: the word for waking up in Slavic languages is the same as the Sanskrit root "budh", which also means "to wake". So Buddha is "the one who has awakened".
> Following that train of thought back one can go all the way to the Roman Empire which used slaves as proto machines as you call them.
All the way to the deepest depth of history actually: Sumer and Elam left behind records of slavery and later on in Ur we find laws seting up a framework for slavery.
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.
Many primary schools in the UK in the 1960s/1970s would have had 'milk monitors' - pupils whose job was to help distribute small servings of milk to their classmates. The milk distribution was an attempt to offset child malnutrition. The role continues to evoke strong feelings today. The Brit ex prime minister Rishi Sunak was described as a 'jumped up milk monitor' and when (in the 1970s) Margaret Thatcher as education secretary (minister) cancelled the school milk programme, she was reviled as 'Thatcher Thatcher Milk Snatcher'.
I was "computer monitor" (no pun!) for a year in the 1990s, when I was about 10.
I can't really remember the timing, but perhaps in the first half hour before lessons had started I would go to the classrooms of the 5-8 year olds, and if the teacher wanted I'd switch on the classroom computer and load the required program. (Maybe a different child did the 9-11 year olds' classrooms?)
It’s listed on that page as a synonym for toil or drudgery. So basically a chore is a fag. It seems like the definition you mention is likely the origin of today’s gay pejorative.
It appears that milk was delivered to the dormitories first thing in the morning, after the same fashion as "the milkman". Distributing said milk was a separate duty from waking up the students, but occurred around the same time; both duties being on a weekly rotation. Therefore it was mutually agreed that the student on milk duty would also bang on the doors as he went, thus relieving the student on Official Door Banging Duty that week from having to get up early to do it. It's unclear why this is described as as a "lie-in", as one would still presumably get woken up along with everyone else...
You underestimate the perversity of boarding school. The important thing is that you are woken - nobody actually checks that you got up, however, until your absence for assembly is noted. If you were good at wriggling into full penguin in 30 seconds while running down the stairs, you could sleep in until 8:38.
But surely this is true of everyone, not just the "doss fag" Official Door Banger In Chief? Or was work allocated such that every single student had something to do first thing in the morning, so that the Door Banger was the only one not actually required to be up?
In the house in general, yeah, but the first years (“shells”) had a rota of tasks, most of which involved delivering something (milk, juice, bread, papers) or taking something away (trash, crockery). Knocking up was the only one where there wasn’t something to carry.
Weekend papers was the worst. Fifty fat newspapers to deliver throughout the house, up winding servants’ stairs.
Coming from a north american public school, I can't imagine one's family paying large sums of money to send you to a boarding school... just to be some older boy's servant. Get your own ass up, or don't, not my problem. I am by no means a rabid libertarian but that kind of environment would drive me to it.
Chances are your public school doesn't have boarders.
If your parents/ siblings ever woke you up...they were fagging (if not voluntary).
Admittedly, some fag systems were just pure bullying, but generally not.
If course, the smokers - after being woke up - would go outside and suck on a fag, but that's another story.
I would pay large sums of money to have my kids learn the lesson that there is a hierarchy and one must always start on the bottom to understand every layer.
That isn’t what one learns. One learns to cheat, lie, and steal, and to exploit systems and manipulate people. You don’t survive if you play by the rules.
"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"
I found out about her first from the Citation Needed comedy show, but then later from the Futility Closet podcast, which pointed out that most of her clients actually needed the service, while some (private houses) were splurging on an extravagance. And also that new technology never immediately replaces old. In the early days, she was more reliable than the telegraph, which tended to break down.
She had clients till the end of her life, though no one took over the business when she died.
I configured timesync (using NTP) for the GWR office networks many years ago. Some years later I used theirs to act as a stable source for Scotrail's office network too.
As I'm sure we all know here: The four horsemen of the IT apocalypse are NTP, DNS and BGP.
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...
> I've lived in houses with original window glass from pre-1900
I live in a house from around that time. I just spent some time replacing the front window with double glazing. The original glass was 2mm thick. It was bending precariously as we removed it from the frame.
How in the world that glass survived as long as it did will forever be a mystery to me.
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"
Back in 1969 I had a summer job at a textile mill in the south of Chile. Time was regulated by the loud steam whistles of the three large textile factories that were the only industry in town. They could be heard throughout the town. A specific sequence (e.g. short-short-long) was the 6 AM wake-up call. There were different sequences for the start of shift, lunch break, etc. It definitely had the feeling of living in a Dickens novel.
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..
"the knocker-up soon found out that while he knocked up one who paid him, he knocked up several on each side who did not" -- I thought it was the employer who paid the knockers!
I guess it makes sense, otherwise you can pretend you don't hear it and excuse yourself from working that day.
This could not have had very much precision - you can’t wake up at 725 if your neighbor is up at 715.
The knocker uppers client base would be limited by the density of housing and their walking speed.
With today’s suburban housing there’s no way to access everyone’s bedroom windows and walk from client to client. Even in urban areas, buildings must have eventually been too tall for a stick to reach.
I wake my children up by turning off the fans/white noise machines they may use and then gently rubbing their backs while whispering things like, "time to wake up buddy."
This is in direct response to my parents' preferred method of waking us up during my childhood of a cold cup of water thrown onto your sleeping body if you were not awake in time.
I find it very interesting how the same phrase is now used for a completely different meaning. Others might see a connection between this use and the one meant in the movie 'Knocked Up' [1], but not being a native speaker of the language, I don't.
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.
Reading about world war 2 has given me a new appreciation for just how manual everything was.
It's amazing that the Allies managed 2 major amphibious landings in June 1944: Normandy was one, Saipan the other. Saipan was about a thousand miles from the nearest Allied forward base, and >3000 miles from Pearl Harbor! All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets.
> All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets.
Well they did have radios, telephones and radar as well. The fire control systems of battleships and anti-aircraft guns led to massive advances in distributed analogue computing that provided early insights into human/machine interactions as well as the beginnings of system-level architecting. The Brits during the Battle of Britain exploited telephone networks and switchboards in innovative ways to create a highly fault (bomb) tolerant decentralised command and control system that formed an early version of the sensor-to-shooter kill chains we see today.
If you've not read Most Secret War I highly recommend it. Dr R V Jones details some of the different systems involved in the Battle of Britain and it's a great book too.
I read 'The Secret War' by Brian Johnson which was based on a 1970s BBC series. I think it's an earlier version of the same thing.
Another great (although very dry) book is 'Between Human and Machine - Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics' by David A. Mindell. This goes into the fire control stuff that I mentioned, and describes how one effect of the war was to force together the different groups that were working on analogue computation.
> I think ['The Secret War' by Brian Johnson is] an earlier version of ['Most Secret War' by R V Jones]
Most Secret War is R V Jones' memoir of his personal involvement in radar, aerial navigation, aerial surveillance etc. in British military intelligence. I read it a long time ago but I don't remember it as a dry read at all - dramatic times after all.
Brian Johnson was involved in writing and producing the BBC documentary and a book. So it's not an earlier version of the same thing. The documentary is on youtube I think - a good watch, but I'd recommend reading Jones' original book.
Everyone reading this right now needs to check out this 1950s naval training video on the mechanical fire control computers of battleships: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4 For fun, before you watch, think for yourself how you'd implement addition, multiplication, squaring, etc. with only gears and other mechanisms.
It's amazing what you can do with just gears, cams, and levers. Project-Rho provides a quick survey of mechanisms. https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/astrodeck.php#...
Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down. People have more time to think about what they can achieve. I vaguely remember Planning for Normandy taking 2 years or something, just cause of all the resources they had to mobilize from around the world.
Contrast with today's wars, were all the real time tech in the world is producing lot of half baked outcomes.
A frequently repeated excuse for WWI germany is that Wilhelm II had expressed desire not to invade the west, but had been told by his military that it was too late to recall the trains. Apparently the guy in charge of the german army's logistics in 1914 wrote a book after the war to explain that not only could he have turned everyone back before the border had he only received a command to do so, but also included appendices with the timetables for doing so.
[my book with the reference is currently unavailable, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan#Der_Weltkrieg suggests it might have been Groener, Das Testament des Grafen Schlieffen: Operativ Studien über den Weltkrieg (1929)]
>Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down.
This has been a major learning in devops too. Sometimes you want the tool to go slow, at least to start, to give a chance to Ctrl-C when you realize you've made a mistake. A bad deploy that gets replicated to 10% of your fleet could be far better than one that goes to 100%.
Note that we got a lot of half-baked outcomes and military disasters with manual processes, too.
don't forget punched cards:
https://pattonhq.com/ibm.html
https://www.ww2online.org/image/large-replica-punch-cards-bu...
>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.
Following that train of thought back one can go all the way to the Roman Empire which used slaves as proto machines as you call them.
>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.
Surnames are funny, I always thought we had a cool one, but apparently it just means someone that lives next to a hedge.
The "alarm clock" surname is pretty cool though if you know this factoid: the word for waking up in Slavic languages is the same as the Sanskrit root "budh", which also means "to wake". So Buddha is "the one who has awakened".
That is super cool. Thanks for the factoid!
> Following that train of thought back one can go all the way to the Roman Empire which used slaves as proto machines as you call them.
All the way to the deepest depth of history actually: Sumer and Elam left behind records of slavery and later on in Ur we find laws seting up a framework for slavery.
> I couldn’t find any equivalent last names in English though.
Since this is somehow 'anglosaxon' I'm pulling thing out of thin air.
In German that would be Wecker as in the thing that is waking you.
So I'd guess in English that would be anything written like Wake.. or derivative from that.
Edit: maybe Whacko ;>
I thought of Wake, too, but those seem to be related to keeping watch rather than waking someone.
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.
My school still exists: founded in 15xx. Fags still fagging in '24.
Bloody red-bricks. My school had its 1400th anniversary while I was there.
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.
'mandatory milk'
Many primary schools in the UK in the 1960s/1970s would have had 'milk monitors' - pupils whose job was to help distribute small servings of milk to their classmates. The milk distribution was an attempt to offset child malnutrition. The role continues to evoke strong feelings today. The Brit ex prime minister Rishi Sunak was described as a 'jumped up milk monitor' and when (in the 1970s) Margaret Thatcher as education secretary (minister) cancelled the school milk programme, she was reviled as 'Thatcher Thatcher Milk Snatcher'.
I was "computer monitor" (no pun!) for a year in the 1990s, when I was about 10.
I can't really remember the timing, but perhaps in the first half hour before lessons had started I would go to the classrooms of the 5-8 year olds, and if the teacher wanted I'd switch on the classroom computer and load the required program. (Maybe a different child did the 9-11 year olds' classrooms?)
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
It’s listed on that page as a synonym for toil or drudgery. So basically a chore is a fag. It seems like the definition you mention is likely the origin of today’s gay pejorative.
It's the same definition. A servant is a person who toils. This is a discussion about English public schools.
See also: ‘can’t be fagged’.
Recommend Roald Dahl's "Boy" for a fascinating glimpse.
As well as a reminder that, at the time (~1930), it was really just a form of extended and unusually cruel hazing.
I found it fairly transparent, maybe because I've read more than one novel in that setting.
Something happened around 7:00-7:15, of that we can be sure.
> ironically, whoever was on knocking up used to get to lie in for the week.
I need to know more about "mandatory milk at the same time" to understand this
Translation:
It appears that milk was delivered to the dormitories first thing in the morning, after the same fashion as "the milkman". Distributing said milk was a separate duty from waking up the students, but occurred around the same time; both duties being on a weekly rotation. Therefore it was mutually agreed that the student on milk duty would also bang on the doors as he went, thus relieving the student on Official Door Banging Duty that week from having to get up early to do it. It's unclear why this is described as as a "lie-in", as one would still presumably get woken up along with everyone else...
You underestimate the perversity of boarding school. The important thing is that you are woken - nobody actually checks that you got up, however, until your absence for assembly is noted. If you were good at wriggling into full penguin in 30 seconds while running down the stairs, you could sleep in until 8:38.
But surely this is true of everyone, not just the "doss fag" Official Door Banger In Chief? Or was work allocated such that every single student had something to do first thing in the morning, so that the Door Banger was the only one not actually required to be up?
In the house in general, yeah, but the first years (“shells”) had a rota of tasks, most of which involved delivering something (milk, juice, bread, papers) or taking something away (trash, crockery). Knocking up was the only one where there wasn’t something to carry.
Weekend papers was the worst. Fifty fat newspapers to deliver throughout the house, up winding servants’ stairs.
Coming from a north american public school, I can't imagine one's family paying large sums of money to send you to a boarding school... just to be some older boy's servant. Get your own ass up, or don't, not my problem. I am by no means a rabid libertarian but that kind of environment would drive me to it.
The writer known as Orwell doesn't seem to have been fond of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887786
[He went to boarding school on scholarship, so that may have been another reason to have been treated poorly by the full-fare students?]
Chances are your public school doesn't have boarders. If your parents/ siblings ever woke you up...they were fagging (if not voluntary). Admittedly, some fag systems were just pure bullying, but generally not. If course, the smokers - after being woke up - would go outside and suck on a fag, but that's another story.
I would pay large sums of money to have my kids learn the lesson that there is a hierarchy and one must always start on the bottom to understand every layer.
That isn’t what one learns. One learns to cheat, lie, and steal, and to exploit systems and manipulate people. You don’t survive if you play by the rules.
Public schools produce sociopaths, in general.
Still, a valuable skillset, I must say.
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
I found out about her first from the Citation Needed comedy show, but then later from the Futility Closet podcast, which pointed out that most of her clients actually needed the service, while some (private houses) were splurging on an extravagance. And also that new technology never immediately replaces old. In the early days, she was more reliable than the telegraph, which tended to break down.
She had clients till the end of her life, though no one took over the business when she died.
People got to have such idyllic jobs back then. Drive into town, then go set some watches. Are there any idyllic jobs left in the modern world?
Computer programming is pretty idyllic when you're in a decent department with a good team.
NTP server.
I configured timesync (using NTP) for the GWR office networks many years ago. Some years later I used theirs to act as a stable source for Scotrail's office network too.
As I'm sure we all know here: The four horsemen of the IT apocalypse are NTP, DNS and BGP.
Who's the fourth horseman? Or did I miss a joke?
There are only 3 hard things in computing: naming things, and off-by-one errors.
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...
> I've lived in houses with original window glass from pre-1900
I live in a house from around that time. I just spent some time replacing the front window with double glazing. The original glass was 2mm thick. It was bending precariously as we removed it from the frame.
How in the world that glass survived as long as it did will forever be a mystery to me.
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"
Of Mice And Men paints a portrait of this type of lifestyle.
Back in 1969 I had a summer job at a textile mill in the south of Chile. Time was regulated by the loud steam whistles of the three large textile factories that were the only industry in town. They could be heard throughout the town. A specific sequence (e.g. short-short-long) was the 6 AM wake-up call. There were different sequences for the start of shift, lunch break, etc. It definitely had the feeling of living in a Dickens novel.
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..
"the knocker-up soon found out that while he knocked up one who paid him, he knocked up several on each side who did not" -- I thought it was the employer who paid the knockers!
I guess it makes sense, otherwise you can pretend you don't hear it and excuse yourself from working that day.
Some thoughts:
This could not have had very much precision - you can’t wake up at 725 if your neighbor is up at 715.
The knocker uppers client base would be limited by the density of housing and their walking speed.
With today’s suburban housing there’s no way to access everyone’s bedroom windows and walk from client to client. Even in urban areas, buildings must have eventually been too tall for a stick to reach.
My mom used to do this with a spray bottle.
I wake my children up by turning off the fans/white noise machines they may use and then gently rubbing their backs while whispering things like, "time to wake up buddy."
This is in direct response to my parents' preferred method of waking us up during my childhood of a cold cup of water thrown onto your sleeping body if you were not awake in time.
I do the same —- I’m extremely gentle waking up my friends, because I remember all the shocks I’ve had from my brother’s abrupt wakeups
You should mix it up. The world won't be as gentle as you.
I find it very interesting how the same phrase is now used for a completely different meaning. Others might see a connection between this use and the one meant in the movie 'Knocked Up' [1], but not being a native speaker of the language, I don't.
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478311/
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!
It was Bart, https://comb.io/vs9gku.
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.
One should be enough to wake a million people, with fan out.
And to this day, being knocked up is a wake up call!
who up-knocks the knocker uppers?
I’m glad the subtitle was included. “Knocker upper” has a very different meaning to me.
Etymology is very interesting. It makes me wonder if there’s any relation to today’s slang for being pregnant, knocked up.
They didn’t come from a knocking shop.
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