Knocker uppers: Waking up the workers in industrial Britain (2016)
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford
https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.psu.edu/dist/f/153578/fi...
As a funny personal note: one of my ancestors actually had the last name (Polish budzik) translated as “alarm clock,” which I assume means they had a similar sort of job as knocker uppers. I couldn’t find any equivalent last names in English though.
It's amazing that the Allies managed 2 major amphibious landings in June 1944: Normandy was one, Saipan the other. Saipan was about a thousand miles from the nearest Allied forward base, and >3000 miles from Pearl Harbor! All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets.
Well they did have radios, telephones and radar as well. The fire control systems of battleships and anti-aircraft guns led to massive advances in distributed analogue computing that provided early insights into human/machine interactions as well as the beginnings of system-level architecting. The Brits during the Battle of Britain exploited telephone networks and switchboards in innovative ways to create a highly fault (bomb) tolerant decentralised command and control system that formed an early version of the sensor-to-shooter kill chains we see today.
Another great (although very dry) book is 'Between Human and Machine - Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics' by David A. Mindell. This goes into the fire control stuff that I mentioned, and describes how one effect of the war was to force together the different groups that were working on analogue computation.
Most Secret War is R V Jones' memoir of his personal involvement in radar, aerial navigation, aerial surveillance etc. in British military intelligence. I read it a long time ago but I don't remember it as a dry read at all - dramatic times after all.
Brian Johnson was involved in writing and producing the BBC documentary and a book. So it's not an earlier version of the same thing. The documentary is on youtube I think - a good watch, but I'd recommend reading Jones' original book.
Contrast with today's wars, were all the real time tech in the world is producing lot of half baked outcomes.
[my book with the reference is currently unavailable, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan#Der_Weltkrieg suggests it might have been Groener, Das Testament des Grafen Schlieffen: Operativ Studien über den Weltkrieg (1929)]
This has been a major learning in devops too. Sometimes you want the tool to go slow, at least to start, to give a chance to Ctrl-C when you realize you've made a mistake. A bad deploy that gets replicated to 10% of your fleet could be far better than one that goes to 100%.
https://www.ww2online.org/image/large-replica-punch-cards-bu...
To add to your personal note, this is the modern translation, etymologically this is more like "the one doing the waking" (similarly to how English "computer" used to describe a person).
IIRC a lot of words in French also work this way: simple translations today, but with more elaborate historical etymologies.
>As a funny personal note: one of my ancestors actually had the last name (Polish budzik) translated as “alarm clock,” which I assume means they had a similar sort of job as knocker uppers. I couldn’t find any equivalent last names in English though.
Surnames are funny, I always thought we had a cool one, but apparently it just means someone that lives next to a hedge.
All the way to the deepest depth of history actually: Sumer and Elam left behind records of slavery and later on in Ur we find laws seting up a framework for slavery.
Since this is somehow 'anglosaxon' I'm pulling thing out of thin air.
In German that would be Wecker as in the thing that is waking you.
So I'd guess in English that would be anything written like Wake.. or derivative from that.
Edit: maybe Whacko ;>
It was a doss fag - by mutual agreement we came to the arrangement that whoever was on milk would also do the knocking up, as everyone got mandatory milk at the same time anyway, so ironically, whoever was on knocking up used to get to lie in for the week.
Many primary schools in the UK in the 1960s/1970s would have had 'milk monitors' - pupils whose job was to help distribute small servings of milk to their classmates. The milk distribution was an attempt to offset child malnutrition. The role continues to evoke strong feelings today. The Brit ex prime minister Rishi Sunak was described as a 'jumped up milk monitor' and when (in the 1970s) Margaret Thatcher as education secretary (minister) cancelled the school milk programme, she was reviled as 'Thatcher Thatcher Milk Snatcher'.
I can't really remember the timing, but perhaps in the first half hour before lessons had started I would go to the classrooms of the 5-8 year olds, and if the teacher wanted I'd switch on the classroom computer and load the required program. (Maybe a different child did the 9-11 year olds' classrooms?)
I need to know more about "mandatory milk at the same time" to understand this
It appears that milk was delivered to the dormitories first thing in the morning, after the same fashion as "the milkman". Distributing said milk was a separate duty from waking up the students, but occurred around the same time; both duties being on a weekly rotation. Therefore it was mutually agreed that the student on milk duty would also bang on the doors as he went, thus relieving the student on Official Door Banging Duty that week from having to get up early to do it. It's unclear why this is described as as a "lie-in", as one would still presumably get woken up along with everyone else...
Weekend papers was the worst. Fifty fat newspapers to deliver throughout the house, up winding servants’ stairs.
[He went to boarding school on scholarship, so that may have been another reason to have been treated poorly by the full-fare students?]
Public schools produce sociopaths, in general.
Still, a valuable skillset, I must say.
"Elizabeth Ruth Naomi Belville (5 March 1854 – 7 December 1943), also known as the Greenwich Time Lady, was a businesswoman from London. She, her mother Maria Elizabeth, and her father John Henry, sold people the time. This was done by setting Belville's watch to Greenwich Mean Time, as shown by the Greenwich clock, each day and then "selling" people the time by letting them look at the watch and adjust theirs"
She had clients till the end of her life, though no one took over the business when she died.
As I'm sure we all know here: The four horsemen of the IT apocalypse are NTP, DNS and BGP.
In particular, she saw chatbots as being an inefficient user interface that would eventually be replaced by better integration between assistants and conventional UI.
I live in a house from around that time. I just spent some time replacing the front window with double glazing. The original glass was 2mm thick. It was bending precariously as we removed it from the frame.
How in the world that glass survived as long as it did will forever be a mystery to me.
The pea shooter method looks quite fun :)
"Oooohh we used to dream of living in a corridor..." - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
One pull quote was a 1920s era law: "Servants and agricultural workers must be given, every other Sunday, at least 4 hours off"
however as an American i nearly dropped a pot of coffee hearing my wife shout something about "knocking up charles dickens" from across the kitchen in front of our kids..
I guess it makes sense, otherwise you can pretend you don't hear it and excuse yourself from working that day.
This is in direct response to my parents' preferred method of waking us up during my childhood of a cold cup of water thrown onto your sleeping body if you were not awake in time.
This could not have had very much precision - you can’t wake up at 725 if your neighbor is up at 715.
The knocker uppers client base would be limited by the density of housing and their walking speed.
With today’s suburban housing there’s no way to access everyone’s bedroom windows and walk from client to client. Even in urban areas, buildings must have eventually been too tall for a stick to reach.
> With the spread of electricity and affordable alarm clocks, however, knocking up had died out in most places by the 1940s and 1950s.
> Yet it still continued in some pockets of industrial England until the early 1970s, immortalised in songs by the likes of folk singer-song writer Mike Canavan.
The reason for that isn't clear.