A stream of water snaked from beneath a pile of grubby clothes and bedding in the shop doorway. And there was a plume of steam as it pooled in the middle of the footpath? You could smell it. Urine.

The knocker-upper was a professional who emerged and persisted during the Industrial Revolution when alarm clocks were expensive and unreliable. By the 1940s and 1950s, this occupation had largely ...

Before smartphones and snooze buttons, people paid someone to bang on their windows with sticks. Meet the knocker-upper—the human alarm clock of industrial Britain. Congress clinches $1.2T funding ...