Levi Hutchins

Levi Hutchins (1761 to 1855) was an American clockmaker from Concord, New Hampshire, and the self-proclaimed inventor of the first American alarm clock. Born in Harvard, Massachusetts, he served as a fifer in the Revolutionary War, and in December 1777 he and his brother Abel became apprentices to the clockmaker Simon Willard. The brothers then set up a shop in Concord, and in 1787 Hutchins built an alarm clock housed in a wooden cabinet with mirrored doors, with an extra gear that rang an attached bell at 4 a.m. He went on making brass clocks, surveying compasses and other precision instruments for decades, briefly ran a cloth-weaving business, and his youngest son published his autobiography in 1865.