Around the early 1970s, the integrated circuit started becoming the “brain” of many low-end consumer products such as calculators. So, to put this another way, inventors focused on improving the way alarms worked had to lean against common sense to come up with the most effective alarms.īut the real turning point to this line of thinking-that alarms had to be loud and garish to get your attention-might have come from the world of computing. “In an alarm in accordance with the invention, the advantages of a peculiar effect can be realized, since good waveshape is of no particular interest just the opposite, in general, the more ragged the wave shape the more arresting the tone, the transducer can be pulsed with short-duration spikes of current and be made to operate at extremely high efficiency,” the patent filing states. Potter in 1966 for the “electrically operated audible alarm,” makes this case pretty clear. In regards to the first, a variety of inventions throughout the 1950s and 1960s took aim at the idea that electronic alarms weren’t reasonable enough in size or design, and that there were specific use cases in which the quality of the sound mattered less than the fact that it was jarring and effective. First off, the buzzer of yore had shrunk to a very manageable size in the form of a piezoelectric transducer and second, the innards of the alarm had become commoditized. The evolution of the digital alarm clock is something of a combination of technologies that became ready at right around the same time-and the way they commoditized the product in general. So, going back to the question I was posed, why the four beeps? And why are those beeps so common, and why is the single-blare alarm sound I know so common? ( Douglas Heriot/Flickr) The evolution of the integrated circuit played an important role in making our alarms sound pretty similar It’s the way the clock bleeds into your eye sockets. They certainly do the job, but in the context of the modern day, they feel, well … wrong.Įventually, we’d find a little more consistency in or noises, and it’s something we can credit technology for. A couple clips by YouTuber batterymaker highlight just how obnoxious these buzzes could really be. ![]() The innovation meant radios and clocks would become intertwined.Īnd as a result of this development, transistor-based solid-state alarm clocks started showing up in the 1960s, and while they did have alarms, they did not sound anything like the beeps and bloops we hear today. With the development of the transistor in the late 1940s, alarm clocks eventually did gain a digital component-along with a new friend. Meanwhile, the company TWEMCO made a name for itself for creating the first fully automatic flip clocks, which were able to not only offer up the time but also the day of the week and the month. The clock, in an updated and reproduced form, is still sold today. After about 10 minutes or so, it would make a loud buzzing noise, as can be heard over this way. Perhaps a key turning point for Westclox’s alarms, however, came from the Moonbeam, which was first released in 1948 and had a novel feature that’s fairly unique to this day-rather than simply going off with a loud buzzing noise, the alarm would initially try to wake you up with a bright flashing light that was hard to miss. (Westclox is perhaps most famous for its Big Ben clocks, which make a quite-impressive alarm sound.) Still, innovation was definitely the name of the game for many clock makers, who offered plenty of competition.Ĭompanies like Westclox, which produced the first alarm clocks with snooze functions, were helping alarm clocks to get past their hand-turning pasts. ![]() As time could not be told with simply numbers in most cases, that meant most clocks had two hands of multiple sizes. In fact, alarm clocks evolved significantly over the years, generally following the basic model of noise reproduction that doorbells of the day did. But what’s often interesting is the fact that most of the alarms you hear on a day to day basis tend to have a somewhat similar sound.īut that consistency didn’t come overnight (pun intended). The invention of the digital clock and the creation of those loud beeps and screeches you grew up on, are two slightly separate things. ( Anuj Biyani/Flickr) The long road that got our alarm clocks beeping An example of a flip clock, the pathway between rotating hands and digital screens.
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