In Britain and Ireland's industrial towns, a knocker-up walked the streets before dawn tapping bedroom windows with a long pole — or, famously in some accounts, shooting dried peas at them — to wake workers for their shifts, for a few pence a week per client. Cheap, reliable alarm clocks, a direct product of mass watch and clock manufacturing, erased the job; the last practitioners worked into the mid-twentieth century.
Knocker-up no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1675 – 1800
The precision century
Huygens' balance spring made the watch a genuine scientific instrument, and the great prize of the age — computing longitude at sea — put watchmakers at the center of national strategy. England's Thomas Mudge invented the lever escapement around 1755, the design that still ticks in almost every mechanical watch; John Harrison's H4 won the sea trials; and in Paris, Breguet made the watch an object of engineering elegance for Europe's courts.
What else was happening then
1761
Harrison's H4 solves longitude at sea
John Harrison's 1.4-kilogram watch H4 sails from Portsmouth to Jamaica aboard HMS Deptford and loses about five seconds in 81 days — accuracy that finally lets navigators compute longitude, the problem Britain's 1714 Longitude Act had priced at £20,000. The Board of Longitude resisted paying for years; Harrison received his final award in 1773, aged 80, after King George III took up his case.
1801
Breguet patents the tourbillon
In Paris, Abraham-Louis Breguet patents the tourbillon, a rotating cage that carries the balance and escapement through all vertical positions to average out the errors gravity causes in a pocket watch. Commercially marginal for two centuries, it became the signature complication of the modern luxury revival — and a standard test piece for elite watchmakers ever since.
1854
The American system reaches watchmaking
Aaron Lufkin Dennison and Edward Howard's factory — from 1854 established at Waltham, Massachusetts — applies the interchangeable-parts methods Dennison had admired at the Springfield Armory to watches. Machine-made Walthams undercut hand-fitted European work so badly that Swiss observers sent to the 1876 Philadelphia exhibition went home warning their industry to mechanize or die.
1926
Rolex makes the wristwatch waterproof
Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf patents the screw-down Oyster case, and in October 1927 puts one on swimmer Mercedes Gleitze during a highly publicized English Channel swim attempt; the watch emerges running after more than ten hours in the water, and Wilsdorf buys the Daily Mail's front page to say so. The wristwatch — a soldiers' convenience of the First World War — becomes a serious instrument.
Where that work lives now
The craftsman who builds and revives the tiny machine on the wrist — a trade that survived the quartz crisis and now has more work than trained hands.
⌚ Watchmaker →