The story
Roosters had this job for 8,000 years.
Four short facts you'll read while you're setting the app up.
01Chickens were alarm clocks before they were dinner
About 8,000 years ago, people in Southeast Asia started keeping wild jungle fowl near their villages. The eggs were nice. The more useful bit was that the rooster shouted every morning and woke the whole place up.
02The Romans named an hour after him
They had no clocks, so they split the night into shifts. One of them was called cockcrow, and it meant the hour just before sunrise. If someone said "meet me at cockcrow", everybody knew when that was.
03Roosters know dawn is coming before it gets here
Researchers in Japan kept roosters in dim light with no sunrise at all. The roosters still crowed about two hours before dawn, every day. They've got a body clock that handles mornings better than most of us do.
04They invented snooze. I didn't.
First bells, then radios, then phones — and a button you could hit half asleep. You can't snooze me off. I'm here so you actually get up.