The knocker upper is what I have heard of before. A person paid to go around with a long pole knocking on peoples bedroom windows to wake them up. Of course who woke up the knocker upper I don’t know. Possibly to get that job you had to be someone who naturally woke early. I believe this practice was carried out in small towns and I would guess in the country side it would have been cockerels doing the waking.
Kind of related to this there was a profession of people who would own an accurate watch and would travel to their local big town to set it every fews days and then they would go around their local area selling people the current time so they could set their own clocks. As I understand it there was a whole network of people doing this with someone presumably starting the ball rolling at Greenwich. Presumably different countries had their own master time source for this whole process to work off of. It’s interesting to think about the logistics of this type of thing before any type of long distance communication.
My cat wakes me every single morning at the exact same time, by meowing loudly. When the time changes (daylight savings), he’s “off” by an hour for a couple weeks. Often, the meowing starts about five minutes before my alarm actually goes off. The dog is useless in this regard; she sleeps through it all.
I would imagine, in the mostly agrarian culture of 100+ years ago, Getting to the cows by exactly 8:00 on the dot wasn’t too critical. Just so you milk 'em before they explode…
Doesn’t work up north, though - we get only 8 hours of proper darkness now and it’s roughly 3 weeks from the equinox. Once summer hits, there’s basically no darkness at all. And on the flip side, in winter if you wait until sun is up it’s 10am already. Granted, most humans had the wisdom to settle south of 60 N.
I thought about that when I was typing the reply being from a northern latitude myself. But it really doesn’t matter where you settle/live. You will be constrained by the amount of visible sunlight. Humans in northern climates would just have less time during the winter to accomplish work. Many humans also have hard time sleeping during the summer due to the excess light. The work year would be skewed towards the summer, but not having an alarm clock wouldn’t matter.
