EARLY RISING

Greymouth Evening Star, 2 December 1926, Page 3

EARLY RISING

NEW ALARM SYSTEM’. A lazy man laughs at alarm clocks. The best way to get him out of bed is to pull the clothes off, and he cannot resist a hot cup of tea ready at the bedside. Professor A. M. Low has invented an automatic getting-out-of-bed machine which will save many a landlady hammering on the bedroom door. An alarm clock is placed on a small wooden shelf clipped on the foot rail of the bed, facing the sleeper. A silk thread is wound round the alarm winder and attached to a trigger pivoted on a screw on the shelf. You set the clock before retiring, and when the alarm winder revolves and the bell rings, the thread causes the trigger to drop. A weight, (a bag of shot for preference) is attached to the trigger by another silk thread or cord which slips off a catch as the trigger falls. A string tied to the weight passes over the bed rail and is linked to the bed clothes by elastic sock suspenders. As the weight falls to the floor off come the bedclothes. Then there is a combined method of getting an automatically- made cup of tea and having the bed clothes pulled off when the tea is ready. You tie the silk thread to the alarm winder as before, and this releases a, steel spring, to which is attached a match in a piece of brass. As the winder revolves the match is pulled sharply through two pieces of sandpaper and lights a methylated lamp. The water boils over into a tea strainer. The cup rests on a pivoted trigger, and the weight of the boiling water causes the trigger to lift and to release the weight and off come the bedclothes again. “I used this gadget years ago, just as an experiment, and it worked successfully,” says Professor Low. “It is a pleasant, gentle, certain, and very useful way of getting out of bed. To wake by physical shock is dangerous, and I do not recommend the patent automatic bed, the bottom of which fell out and plunged the sleeper into a cold bath. “We may be wakened by wireless some day. Bedside loud speakers may rattle fearsome noises in our ears and give us the weather forecast and news whilst we dress.”