Levi Hutchins invented the very first mechanical alarm clock in 1787, but he engineered it with a rather severe limitation: it could only ring at exactly four in the morning.

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Levi Hutchins invented the very first mechanical alarm clock in 1787, but he engineered it with a rather severe limitation: it could only ring at exactly four in the morning. He constructed the device purely for his own personal schedule and never even bothered to patent the invention because he assumed nobody else would want it. Hutchins unintentionally birthed the most universally despised morning ritual in human history, subjecting generations to the jolting terror of a sudden mechanical awakening. Instead of letting humanity wake up naturally with the sun like well-rested biological organisms, one eighteenth-century morning person ruined sleep forever. Modern society's collective exhaustion and reliance on five cups of iced coffee a day can all be traced back to this painfully punctual overachiever