Few things start a day off worse than sleeping through your morning alarm, or hitting snooze until it is too late. Oddly enough, this problem was solved 132 years ago today by George Q. Seaman’s Time Alarm Bed, which as patented on July 19, 1892, as U.S. Patent No. 479307:

Mr. Seaman explained that “It is well known that the ordinary alarm-clock often fails of its purpose in waking people or at least in compelling them to get up; and the object of my invention is to produce a bed and attachments therefor which will overcome this difficulty and which at any required time will actually eject the occupant of the bed, so that the said occupant will not only be awakened, but must necessarily arise.”

Of course, ejecting the occupant is a bit extreme. It seems that oversleeping was a problem in 1892, because earlier that year another inventor, Samuel Applegate, obtained U.S.Patent No. 256,265 on a Device for Waking Persons from Sleep. Applegate’s device drops sixty blocks of light wood or cork on the face of the sleeping person:

Not surprisingly, being dumped out of bed (as Mr. Seaman proposed) or smacked in the face with 60 wood/cork blocks (as Mr. Applegate proposed), did not stand the test of time, and the urgent trill of a cell phone is what gets most of us going in the morning