By the time the snooze feature was added in the 1950s, the innards of alarm clocks had long been standardized. This meant that the teeth on the snooze gear had to mesh with the existing gear configuration, leaving engineers with a single choice: They could set the snooze for either a little more than nine minutes, or a little more than 10 minutes. But because reports indicated that 10 minutes was too long, allowing people to fall back into a "deep" sleep, clock makers decided on the nine-minute gear, believing people would wake up easier and happier after a shorter snooze.
there was already a standardized gear system for alarm clocks when snooze buttons were invented. Because of this pre-existing setup, clockmakers had to decide whether a snooze should last nine minutes or longer than ten minutes. If you hit snooze at, let's say, 7:15, the mechanism would know to go off again at 7:24, when the last gear turned to 4. If you're having trouble picturing this, it might help to think about those popular clocks from the '70s and '80s with numerals printed on rotating cards. All four numerals moved independently of one another, so with a nine-minute snooze, the button was only connected to (and trigged by) the rightmost number.
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