Postcard History

by St. John Paul Chowder

When I was a kid, my dad claimed that he would wake up after a good night’s sleep at exactly 5:45 AM. He would shower while mom made him breakfast and he would be on his way to work – out the door, so to speak – at 6:30. My dad was a history professor in a small Rhode Island liberal arts college in Barrington, Rhode Island.

To the best of my knowledge, he never used an alarm clock, but when my sister and I closed my parent’s house after mother died in 1985, we found three alarm clocks on a shelf in the bedroom along with a shoe-box full of postcards. The clocks presented me with no reason to keep them, and they were relegated to the tag sale my sister insisted on holding. The postcards were much more interesting, and I decided to keep them … at least until I had time to investigate their value and why my father would have collected them.

So here I am forty years later, and I still have eleven of my father’s postcards – the ones related to time and clocks. I bought my first postcard in 1987 and I have 63 additional cards related to time and clocks that I have added over the years. Here are some of my favorites.

The first card on my Favorite Postcards List is the pea-shooter lady. It is a grungy old card that my father had. It was postmarked at Southwark Station on April 22, 1937. The sender was thoughtful to write the story of the image as a message to “Dear Sister.”

Mary Smith, over, is a famous ‘knocker-upper’ in my new East End neighborhood. Her pea shooter skills are legend. Do you have such a person near you? What I wonder is, how does she herself wake up?

When I searched for Mary Smith in an online newspaper morgue, I found that Mary’s wake-up service was advertised in every Monday issue of the newspapers. Her ad read: “Spend sixpence a day; never be late again.”

In England, well into the 1930s, a ‘knocker-upper’ was paid to wake people by tapping long sticks on windows. Others, like Mary, would use a pea shooter and a mouthful of navy beans to wake her clients. At the time, large factories or mills in England often employed pea shooters to make rounds and wake their employees! 

The second card on my list is the first card I purchased to add to my father’s collection. It is a splendid reminder of my days at Fort Polk, Louisiana. I never had a bugler stand outside my pup tent to blow “reveille,” but there was a public-address system speaker almost over my head. I never slept through first-call.

Believe me when I write that I am totally ambivalent about roosters. I do have one bad experience, also when I was in the army, with a rooster who thought that “0-two-hundred” was time to crow, but I think he finished his days in the farmer’s stew pot.

The card above is an early chrome that my father received from a friend in 1955. If you knew my father’s peculiar sense of humor, he would have imagined a rooster as the alarm clock used by Adam and Eve.

I suppose my story will end when someone cleans out my house, hopefully many years from now, but since I have anointed myself Rhode Island’s only alarm-clock “know-it-all,” please allow me to entertain you with some alarm-clock history.

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Alarm clocks are not glamorous. Alarm clocks are not funny. They are somewhat useful, but they perform no service that cannot be obtained in many other ways. Shall we say that alarm clocks are simply redundant.  Alarm clocks do however characterize the evolution of timekeeping and human ingenuity in the last five centuries. Let’s first look at timekeeping; then clocks.

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The earliest timekeeping devices were sundials and water clocks used in ancient civilizations such as Egypt and China. Such devices measured time based on the movement of the sun or the flow of water. While they did not have alarm functions, they did help regulate daily life by providing a rough idea of time.

Around the mid-fourteenth century when monks were among the first to need alarms to wake up for prayer and other regular religious duties, mechanical clocks equipped with bells to signal the hours of a day, began to appear in monasteries. The first true mechanical clocks with alarms were invented near the end of the eighteenth century.

The first American alarm clock was created in 1787 by Levi Hutchins of Concord, New Hampshire. Levi invented his clock for his use only, it was a spring-driven apparatus designed to ring only at 4 AM, to wake him for his job. The first to file for a patent on an adjustable mechanical alarm was Antoine Redier, who filed his claim in France in 1847.

The industrial revolution was a new era for clocks of all kinds. With advancements in technology, clocks became more affordable. Then, in the twentieth century, came electricity. Some historians claim that the electric clock was invented in 1840. This is highly disputable, because electric clocks were not in common use until the late 1920s.

General Electric Company was the first to offer electric alarm clocks that were precise and affordable. GE’s innovations allowed for a wider variety of sounds, adjustable settings, and more reliable wake-up functions.

Westclox (clock makers since 1919) soon followed in the 1940s with the Big Ben and Baby Ben alarm clocks. The “snooze” alarm clock was engineered in 1956 but was not introduced until 1959 by Westclox and was named Drowse. It had a selector switch for five or ten minute snooze time.

It was clock like the Drowse that put people like Mary Smith out-of-work. Sorry!

Today, most people know about clock and watch functions. They can do much more than keep time – everything from monitoring heart function and diet management to sleep tracking.

Do you know? There is something called “white noise.” Alarm clocks can make it even if you don’t know what it is!