I seem to remember the first one of these I bought for myself had a handwritten price attached to it that looked this – 1s/6d.
It was an actual clock for twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes every day and the face of it was so bare of clutter that you could tell the time at forty yards. It was made of tin, light to lift and had to be rewound every night. But when it was showtime at eight in the morning, the thing could wake the dead. There were two bells on top of it and it sounded like a fucking Cathedral in your room when those went off. You sort of jumped out of bed in fright and stood there with chest beating wondering where you were. It was that kind of alarm clock.
And it didn't do the modern thing of letting you nod off again either and calling you later. You had to tap a button between the bells otherwise it would keep going until your previous rewind wore off and if you ignored it, the Peelers would be banging down the door.
It became my definition of an alarm clock actually. It was there to wake you when you had an important meeting to be at but you went to bed with a full cargo of beer on board. As long as you remembered to set the thing and drink a pint of water, you were there on time and without a hangover. Naturally when setting it you had to also factor in an extra ten minutes in the morning just to pee. It was like a fire hose after a late night and as Billy Connelly once said, "You couldn't stop it with a jubilee clip.
Fast forward what seems like a million years and alarm clocks came with radios, cassette players and a bewildering array of buttons and settings. There was even one model you could set up to make tea for you apparently. The bedside locker became cluttered because there was the also landline phone, the answering machine for same and an array of zappers for the TV and VCR at the bottom of the bed. And the bedside lamp could have a huge footprint.
I remember a line from poster back then that read, "When you are up to your bollicks in alligators, it's hard sometimes to remember that the original plan was to drain the swamp." I felt like that a bit sitting on the bed in my jocks with the bedroom swaying, the digital clock reading 3.30am but with a meeting downtown at 8.00am and my fuddled brain trying to remember how to set the fucking radio/alarm clock.
Fast forward yet again to the modern age and I know my smart-ass phone is supposed to be able to wake me and I have no doubt that even my Mac has some setting that would transport it up the stairs to nudge me awake but I also know software can have one bum line of code and it's Murphy's Law that this will kick in when you badly need to show up for something really important. So having reason for a few months to arise at 6.00am on the dot every morning, I asked herself to get me an alarm clock, (because I wouldn't know where to start to find one today).
Now let me say first that I'm blessed in the sleeping department. When I climb into the hay it is mere seconds before I'm gone off into the sleep of the dead. There's a nasty rumour out there that I even snore but as I've never heard it myself, I can't confirm that. However, I can only sleep in darkness. Any light, natural of otherwise in the room, and I'm tossing and turning. So the good lady returned with my new digital alarm clock in a small light box and I plugged it in and set it up around noon. No wuckin' furies you might think, as I did myself. I even set the time for 0600 the next day and forgot about it.
That is until I pulled the dark curtains, got into bed that night and turned off the bedside lamp. Instead of everything going reliably dark black, a neon yellowish-red glow lit up the room like a nightclub. I couldn't fucking believe my eyes. A bright sign on the wall at the end of my bed read, 11.38PM. With bedside light on instantly and propped up on one elbow, I examined my new alarm clock. It was like a spotlight in the dark. If they'd had it in WWII they could have pointed it out over the Atlantic and picked out the conning tower of a U-Boat with it.
But its one saving grace was the absolute flat wide area of readout. By standing it on its face rather then its legs the lights disappeared and I was asleep in seconds. Now all I have to do in the morning is lift it slightly by the power cable to discover the time. As for the actual alarm, it kind of nags you out of bed rather than scaring the shit clean out of you.
But my point is, there's work still to be done to design the ideal alarm clock.