Josh Clark

You could use the heat from an incense stick, I guess, or whatever, to basically burn through a thread and drop a bunch of, like, bells or something into a metal dish.

That'll wake you up for sure every time.

And apparently Chinese messengers would take incense and light one end and put the other end between their toes and wake themselves up like that, which is...

Man, just drink a bunch of water.

That's all you need to do.

Don't burn your toes.

Yeah, that's true.

But like I said, that's like literally lighting a fuse and it like, you know, you get the hot foot and, you know, it's time to get up and deliver the mail or whatever.

That's right.

We also have candle clocks that came along.

This is the medieval era.

Notably, Alfred the Great supposedly would get his day together and time it by six candles.

Each would burn for about four hours.

So six times four, 24.

Yeah, you could also take, say, a four-hour candle and break it, like just mark equal lines across it and basically keep track of time like that, too.

Then there's astrolabes.

I'm not even going to try to really describe an astrolabe.

Go look those up.

They are incredibly intricate mechanically.

They were invented by Muslims in…