My alarm clock is my biggest nemesis. I am not a morning person. Every awakening is a rude awakening, but the shrill ringing of my alarm is the rudest. It’s mean and it’s loud and it’s my least favourite sound. But I thought I could use the power of the design story to face my enemy and hopefully learn to appreciate it a little more.

There was a time before the alarm clocks we know and hate. In that magical land that time forgot (not the one with adorable dinosaurs), most people didn’t just sleep all day. So how did they do it?

You could argue that our ancestors were just better in tune with their own bodies and the rhythms of nature. With limited artificial light and being subjected more keenly to the change in temperatures through the day, they went to sleep when the day got dark and rose again when the light did. In nature, animals rely on their circadian rhythms and they get by just fine.

But never to settle with what our mama (nature) gave us, from very early on people have tried to find ways to mark time and set alarms.

One of my favourite pseudo alarm clocks comes from China in the form of candle clocks. These had the benefit of working night or day, unlike sundials. Candles were marked with even gradations. When the candle burned down, each marking would then represent a unit of time. At their chosen marking they would insert nails into the candle. Then when the candle had melted enough the nails would fall from the candle, no longer held in by wax, and create a sound as they fell into the metal tray below.

In 1319, the first chiming of the first church bells was recorded. These acted, essentially, as giant communal alarm clocks, with regular chiming on the hour every hour. Depending on where you were you even got some ringtones as fancy as anything your iPhone will produce thanks to the artists stylings of skilled campanologists.

Leaving behind China’s ingenuity and the artistry of campanology we turn to Britain in the 1800s, where the upper classes quickly came to the realisation – why invent something when you can just pay someone to do to a job for you? Thus, the occupation of knocker-upper was created. Using everything from pea-shooters, to truncheons, to just a good old-fashioned rap on the door, knocker uppers when around the houses of their clients knocking to wake them up. So they were exactly what their name suggests. As the working classes in cities expanded so did the work of knocker uppers. In fact, they were still knocking as late as 1970.

Perhaps that’s because the first mass-produced personal alarm clock didn’t enter the market until the 1870s. If you ask someone on the street to draw you an alarm clock they’re likely to draw you a round face with a bell either side and two little feet. I actually still rely on pretty much exactly this kind of clock – the one you can see below! This clock was originally manufactured in a hand wound form by the Seth E. Thomas Clock Company. But it rose to fame after Thomas’s death in 1859 some time closer to 1900 in the hands of the Wesclox Company. The Westclox alarm had “a mainspring for the time-mechanism, and a bell-spring, for the alarm. They also featured a dial at the top for the user to set the alarm to ring at whatever time they chose. These clocks ran on 36-hour springs, and had to be wound each morning (or evening). The bell-springs generally had to be wound up every two or three days, depending on how deep the sleeper happened to be!”

We wouldn’t have the annoying beep-beep beep-beep of the digital alarm clock without the invention of the electrical doorbell in 1831. Joseph Henry’s decision to use a tightly coiled electromagnet to make a high-pitched noise, would change the sound of mornings as well as unexpected guests forever. Well, at least it would in just over 6- years later when Austrian Josef Pallweber got his hands on the buzzer and made it a part of his clocks.

But it seems that many of us have replaced the single use alarm clock with, you guessed it, our smartphones. In a survey by O2, in 2012, 54% of their customers had replaced an alarm clock with their phone. Despite a number of studies telling us not to, telling us not to have our phones be the first thing we see, I would bet that number has increased in the 7 years since that study.

But, whatever form your alarm takes, the elephant in the room of alarm clock we’ve not discussed is why we need them. I hear you saying so that we wake up on time. I hear it, and I raise it another why. Back in the days of relying on church bells and calling cockerels people got up early to make the most of the day light and in many places because morning prayers were seen as particularly spiritual. Then our good friend the industrial revolution came along closely followed by its BFF the 9-5. So instead of following our own circadian rhythms we had a set time we needed to be awake. It was precise. It was mechanical. It was just like our alarm clocks.

I’m not sure I’ll ever love my alarm clock, but I am glad I don’t have to rely on a burning and candles to help me get to work on time. That said I don’t think I’d be hitting snooze quite as often if I had to pay a stranger to knock on my door every morning. I’m just going to stick with my trusty Newgate for now though.

When I was looking for inspiration for another design story, I tipped out the contents of the font pocket of my bag, where many treasures can be found. One of the many things that poured out was my emergency safety pin, and I realised I had no idea how something I’ve turned to in moments of clothing strife and was so common in my childhood as the daughter of a frequent fun-runner came to be.

People have been using pins to hold their clothes in place for centuries. In Homer’s Odyssey there’s a wonderful description of Odysseus wearing a pin which holds great symbolic value within the text:

“Odysseus wore a woolen purple cloak,

a two-fold one, and in it was a pin of gold,

with double grooves, and on the front was a marvelous design”  (Odyssey 19.225–227)

These pins had great significance as both a marker of social status and spiritual connection. While changes in fashion may have made the pin less useful in the mediterranean as the years moved on, by the time ancient Rome was flourishing so was the humble clothing pin. These pins were known as fibulae and came in a number of pieces: the body, the pin, the spring and the hinge. The body of the fibulae was typically made of bronze, but just like Odysseus’s pin they were often made of finer metals and adorned with jewels as decoration.

Those ancient pins are absolutely wonderful to look at, they were always some of my favourite objects to spend time with at the Ashmolean. But they’re quite a step away from the humble safety pin. For that simple single wire design we need to turn to New York in 1849.

There we find Walter Hunt. Walter Hunt was a masterful inventor, he has several patents to his name including the sewing machine, the ice plough, a forerunner of the winchester repeating rifle and the street car bell amongst many more, including our beloved safety pin. But Walter wasn’t a great business man. In 1849 he owed a peer $15 (about $500 in today’s money) and he head debt collectors knocking at his door. So, Walter turned to his natural talent for invention and started playing with the only material he had to hand, a piece of wire. He turned that piece of wire into a shape which could safely clasp. He quickly patented his idea and sold that patent to W.R. Grace for what seemed to be a great sum at $400 (about $13,000 today), which was more than enough to pay off his debt.

W.R. Grace were able to turn that $400 investment in Walter’s idea into millions once they started manufacturing the “dress pin” as it was then known. This was just one example in a long string of many where Walter didn’t quite get to reap the rewards of his work.

It took a little while for the safety pin to become the ubiquitous clasp we all know and love. In 1870s another group of inventors added the safety guard to protect the users fingers properly. They also worked out how to mass produce the pin, which is always a major turning point in these design stories. “By 1914, American factories alone were making over 1.33 billion safety pins annually at a cost of $0.007 each, a stunning example of the industrial order’s democratization of an ancient and medieval luxury product.”

While the need for the use of the safety pin started to wane as we moved into the late 1900s. There were better ways to secure nappies and diapers, clothes were being mass produced, there were just generally fewer things to secure. That was until the safety pin, which had once been a symbol of spirituality became a punk rock icon. Punks turned to the safety pin to hold their ripped clothes together after big nights and to attach patches signifying their favourite bands of the era. Famously, Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols wore a shirt held together with safety pins in the video for God Save the Queen. As Adam Wray writes for Billboard “as a result, the safety pin has come to symbolize punk’s scrappy, DIY ethos, even when it appears outside of a punk context.”

Today, we have plenty of ways to secure our clothes, but the safety pin prevails. Thousands of them were used in the last Olympics because we’ve still not found a better way to quickly secure a numbered bib to a jersey. Mum’s across the world have a secret stash in sewing boxes. Not only that they still endure as a political symbol, even if it’s one quite different to the statement Odysseus was making in ancient Greece.