ALARM

The first mechanical alarm clock was created by the Turk Taqi al-Din, who described it in his 1559 book Al-Kawākib al-durriyya fī wadh' al-bankāmat al-dawriyya. To make it ring at a certain time, it was sufficient to place a peg on the circular dial corresponding to the time you wanted the alarm to ring; it emitted an automatic ring that began at the specified time interval. The alarm clock as we know it today is instead an invention made in 1787 by the American watchmaker Levi Hutchins; he needed the device because for work reasons he was forced to get up precisely at 4 in the morning, an hour when there was no light. The Frenchman Antoine Redier was the first to patent an adjustable mechanical alarm clock, in 1847.