Question
How did people wake up on time before the invention of the alarm clock?
Answer
http://www.quora.com/How-did-people-wake-up-on-time-before-the-invention-of-the-alarm-clock/answer/Marc-Bodnick is pretty a good straight-up one. I'll add some additional context.
Two good references for this subject are David Landes' Revolution in Time and Jeremy Rifkin's Time Wars. This question is party of extensive research that has been done on the social anthropology of time.
Your question depends on the definitions of "job" and "on time." Yes people have always had work (not "jobs") that they needed to get to at certain times. But "on time" has meant very different things.
So short answer: they mostly didn't need to. Their natural waking-up behaviors were enough for what they needed to.
If you look at pre-industrial temporal cultures, you'll notice that everything they do was/is related to natural rhythms. The cows need to be taken to pasture, you need to work on the fields, feed the chickens.
Most people also lived pretty much next to where they worked. Home/work were not separated until the industrial age. Tradespeople lived behind/above their shops.
For most of these types of work, the accuracy and precision required is not high in a global sense. You need to be accurate in a local sense (relative to sunrise and your neighbors' schedules rather than an atomic clock, say) and the precision required is fairly low. +/- 15 minutes with respect to sunrise (itself a fuzzy event) is enough. The cock's crow or the light falling on your face is enough. If you need to wake up before sunrise, there are other cues you can get sensitive to. Plus the stability of the rhythms needed and the fact that our body clocks naturally entrain to the main clock (sunlight) means you'll naturally wake up at the right time with no artificial aids needed.
In fact a standard-time clock and alarm is a pain in the neck here. It is more precise and accurate, yes, but with respect to the wrong time references. If your daily schedule revolves around sunrise rituals when animals start waking up, why not just wake up the sun instead of keeping your "accurate" clock in sync with the sun and tracking sunrise times relative to standard time? A natural clock with just 3 markers: sunrise, sunset and noon, is sufficient for most types of pre-industrial work.
In fact the most precise timekeeping was mainly required not for work, but for religious duties. The most advanced clocks/alarm systems have historically been associated with churches and mosques, before industry found a use for them.
What really made alarm clocks necessary was not being on time, but coordination over larger social/temporal/spatial scales. It was/is common to make appointments in local/agrarian cultures of the "I'll see you in the afternoon in the field" or "come by my house for dinner" variety. What first made alarm clocks necessary was the railroads and coordination of train schedule. There is an exhibit in the union pacific railroad museum in Omaha that illustrates this point well:
Later, as manufacturing evolved to use assembly lines and modern Taylorist "scientific" management, you had the familiar modern phenomenon of klaxon alarms sounding in blue collar districts calling workers to the morning shift (and later, industrial style schools adding their own assembly, period and recess alarms).
Two good references for this subject are David Landes' Revolution in Time and Jeremy Rifkin's Time Wars. This question is party of extensive research that has been done on the social anthropology of time.
Your question depends on the definitions of "job" and "on time." Yes people have always had work (not "jobs") that they needed to get to at certain times. But "on time" has meant very different things.
So short answer: they mostly didn't need to. Their natural waking-up behaviors were enough for what they needed to.
If you look at pre-industrial temporal cultures, you'll notice that everything they do was/is related to natural rhythms. The cows need to be taken to pasture, you need to work on the fields, feed the chickens.
Most people also lived pretty much next to where they worked. Home/work were not separated until the industrial age. Tradespeople lived behind/above their shops.
For most of these types of work, the accuracy and precision required is not high in a global sense. You need to be accurate in a local sense (relative to sunrise and your neighbors' schedules rather than an atomic clock, say) and the precision required is fairly low. +/- 15 minutes with respect to sunrise (itself a fuzzy event) is enough. The cock's crow or the light falling on your face is enough. If you need to wake up before sunrise, there are other cues you can get sensitive to. Plus the stability of the rhythms needed and the fact that our body clocks naturally entrain to the main clock (sunlight) means you'll naturally wake up at the right time with no artificial aids needed.
In fact a standard-time clock and alarm is a pain in the neck here. It is more precise and accurate, yes, but with respect to the wrong time references. If your daily schedule revolves around sunrise rituals when animals start waking up, why not just wake up the sun instead of keeping your "accurate" clock in sync with the sun and tracking sunrise times relative to standard time? A natural clock with just 3 markers: sunrise, sunset and noon, is sufficient for most types of pre-industrial work.
In fact the most precise timekeeping was mainly required not for work, but for religious duties. The most advanced clocks/alarm systems have historically been associated with churches and mosques, before industry found a use for them.
What really made alarm clocks necessary was not being on time, but coordination over larger social/temporal/spatial scales. It was/is common to make appointments in local/agrarian cultures of the "I'll see you in the afternoon in the field" or "come by my house for dinner" variety. What first made alarm clocks necessary was the railroads and coordination of train schedule. There is an exhibit in the union pacific railroad museum in Omaha that illustrates this point well:
Later, as manufacturing evolved to use assembly lines and modern Taylorist "scientific" management, you had the familiar modern phenomenon of klaxon alarms sounding in blue collar districts calling workers to the morning shift (and later, industrial style schools adding their own assembly, period and recess alarms).