V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: Inventor of e-mail honored by Smithsonian
By Emi Kolawole, Published: February 18
Clarification: A number of readers have accurately pointed out that electronic messaging predates V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai’s work in 1978. However, Ayyadurai holds the copyright to the computer program called“email,” establishing him as the creator of the “computer program for [an] electronic mail system” with that name, according to the U.S. Copyright Office.
The Smithsonian has acquired the tapes, documentation, copyrights, and over 50,000 lines of code that chronicle the invention of e-mail. The lines of code that produced the first “bcc,” “cc,” “to” and “from” fields were the brainchild of then-14-year0old inventor V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai.
On Thursday, his name, his 1978 invention documentation and the associated copyright were entered in the Smithsonian permanent collection. The documentation will be archived in the National Museum of American History and put into an online exhibit. The documents will be scanned as soon as this week to be featured on a site under the Smithsonian.org domain. The date for the site launch has not yet been determined.
Ayyadurai’s path to the Smithsonian started with a series of articles he wrote about the U.S. Postal Service’s decline and his concern that the USPS was failing to innovate. His take: The Postal Service, carrying on the spirit of innovation which led to its creation, should have embraced e-mail years ago.
After a profile in Time magazine and a call from the Postal Service Inspector General asking for his ideas, Ayyadurai’s alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called to insist that it would be improper for the university to take the documentation of his work, and that it belonged in the Smithsonian. Conversations began, eventually leading to the Smithsonian’s latest addition and the celebration Thursday.
“My mom just passed away. So, it was unfortunate she wasn’t there,” said Ayyadurai during an interview at the Washington Post Thursday afternoon. “She represented for me a woman who came from very, very meager backgrounds — struggled to come here and then become a mathematician herself at a time when women weren’t supposed to get an education and work at a university as a systems analyst.”
“I think,without my mom,” he continued, “I would not have, as a young person, been introduced to that environment and had the opportunity to work there.”
Ayyadurai recounted how a family friend who had heard of MIT recommended that he apply. Reluctant, Ayyadurai filled out his application in pencil, with the family friend standing over his shoulder to make sure he finished.
“I didn’t even know about MIT until two weeks before I applied,” said Ayyadurai.
When he arrived he entered an environment still shadowed by racism. It was the beginning of the Reagan Administration, and the campus, like the rest of the nation, was still struggling to integrate. And there was another problem: “The people there didn’t seem very happy,” said Ayyadurai.
“I came in having developed this e-mail system, and when I went to my classes I was very bored. … I, essentially, got involved in a lot of radical politics,” he continued.
Coming from India, which, at the time, had a rigid caste system, he identified with the black and poor white students on campus.
“I was very intrigued by how do you change the system,” said Ayyadurai, who balanced his time between the studying technology and studying politics. Changing that system, he continued, was more complex than developing an e-mail system.
A recommendation for the young inventor
When it comes to today’s young people, particularly the 14-year-old eager to become an inventor, Ayyadurai recommends recommends embarking on independent studies, and taking a break from school before heading to college.
“I, in fact, believe people should work before they even go to school,” said Ayyadurai, a faculty lecturer at MIT in the Biological Engineering Division. “Many people don’t even know why they’re going to college.”
But he’s not against going to college entirely, rather he is a fan of a combination of experiential learning and rote discipline. After all, Ayyadurai is at the front lines when it comes to preparing America’s youth for careers in science and technology.
He developed a class on traditional medicine and systems technology and another on systems visualization at MIT. The latter gives students who would otherwise not engage in the arts an opportunity to illustrate a complex concept. The course went from 6 to 32 and now 50 students, becoming one of the most popular classes on campus.
Based on his experience with the class, Ayyadurai recommends teaching the systems first and then bringing in the more complex, detailed math and science.
“The problems of today’s world are not just learning how to build a computer better or writing a software program. A lot of that stuff is being outsourced,” said Ayyadurai. “The big problems are large-scale systems.” Think education, transportation and even relationships, he said.
“If we can teach students that the world is very complex and to understand that complexity you need to have a systems approach,” he continued, “I think that systems approach is what students want to learn.”
The intellectual property debate
“I fundamentally do not believe in the patenting of software,” said Ayyadurai. “It would be like Shakespeare patenting the tragic love story.”
He admits that in his work as a venture capitalist he has had to go against his own belief. But, rather than patents, Ayyadurai prefers copyright, which allows others to innovate using the technology.
By pursuing a copyright on his e-mail work, Ayyadurai opened it up for use, but with credit. Had he pursued a patent, it could have significantly stunted the technology’s growth even as it had the potential to make him incredibly wealthy.
America, freedom and innovation
“We fail to recognize how much freedom we actually have here relative to these other countries,” said Ayyadurai when asked what the United States gets wrong when it comes to moving its innovation economy forward.
“That awareness,” he continued, “is what needs to be developed for people.”
India and China, two countries making significant strides in technology and innovation still lag behind the U.S., according to Ayyadurai, who says it’s due to a lack of fundamental freedoms in those nations.
“We should not really have any types of jobs issues here,” continued Ayyadurai, saying that the “basis of American democracy” is innovation.
“Innovation actually demands freedom, and freedom demands innovation,” said Ayyadurai. “I don’t think there’s more money we need to throw at it.”
Ayyadurai also has some recommendations for the presidential candidates when it comes to policy proposals that will accelerate rather than slow innovation growth.
“Small businesses, I believe, are the place where innovation really takes place,” said Ayyadurai.
With venture capital moving away from mid- and small-tier businesses, those companies are in need of government assistance. “There’s this whole strata of small businesses that needs tax credits, I think.”
Are we overcommunicating?
“I think people are overcommunicating in the sense they have missed out on what is communication,” said Ayyadurai. “A lot of time when people are texting, it’s not the content — you don’t need to text — but people are doing it just to connect with another human being, so a lot of the information is almost irrelevant.”
“I think we’re in this phase now in humanity where we have all these communication vehicles but we still are, as humans, trying to figure out how do we connect,” he continued, “because that ritual mode of communication is removed from us.”
Roger Ekirch | Department of History
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“And I have found evolutionary and historical precedent for my sleep cycles. Just the other day I spoke with Roger Ekirch, a Virginia Tech historian who has focused on sleep in Western cultures and has written At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. He told me that in the preindustrial era, before the proliferation of modern lighting, people routinely used to wake from their ‘first sleep’ sometime after midnight to talk with others, smoke a pipe, rob the nearby orchard or bring in the cows. After about an hour, he said, people returned to bed for their ‘second sleep’ until dawn. ‘It makes perfect sense if you accept the premise that segmented sleep was the dominant form of slumber before the Industrial Revolution,’ Ekirch said. ‘It makes perfect sense that a biological pattern since time immemorial would not relinquish its hold easily, that it would not fade rapidly into the mists of history. The process instead would be prolonged and erratic. Consolidated sleep is an artificial invention of modern life.’”
- Laura Hambleton, “An Insomniac Learns to Make the Most of Getting the Least Sleep,” The Washington Post, February 14, 2011
“But what’s interesting is that in some of the research that’s come out, particularly Roger Ekirch’s book, his history of the night, he talks about before the invention of electric light, people slept in segmented sleep. They would sleep for a few hours, they’d be up for several hours, and then they’d be – fall back asleep again. So in many respects that sleep pattern is fairly natural.”
- Patricia Morrisroe, NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” May 4, 2010
“But is insomnia a modern problem? Are we sleeping less than we used to? Did people in prehistoric and ancient times really crash with the sunset and sleep til the cocks crowed? Is the prescribed eight hours a construct to suit industrial times? In his 2005 ground-breaking book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, American historian Roger Ekirch documented how humans slept through the ages — but not necessarily through the night. ‘He said that people slept in segmented sleep,’’ says [Patricia] Morrisroe. ‘They’d fall asleep for a couple of hours. They’d get up. They might talk. They might have sex with their bedfellows as there were often multiple people in beds because they often had communal beds. They’d pray. They would analyze their dreams. Maybe some would go out and steal livestock. Then they would go back to sleep. So this concept of segmented sleep may be very natural to us.’’’
- Antonia Zerbislas, Toronto Star, May 1, 2010
“Ekirch relates, in perhaps his most fascinating revelation, pre-industrial man slept a segmented sleep. He has found more than 500 references, from Homer onwards, to a ‘first sleep’ that lasted until maybe midnight, and was followed by ‘second sleep’. In between the two, people routinely got up, peed, smoked, read, chatted, had friends round, or simply reflected on the events of the previous day – and on their dreams. (Plenty also had sex, by all accounts far more satisfactorily than at the end of a hard day’s labouring. Couples who copulated ‘after the first sleep, wrote a 16th-century French doctor, ‘have more enjoyment, and do it better’.) Experiments by Dr Thomas Wehr at America’s National Institute of Mental Health appear to bear out the theory that this two-part slumber is man’s natural sleeping pattern: a group of young male volunteers deprived of light at night for weeks at a time rapidly fell into the segmented sleep routine described in so many of Ekirch’s documentary sources. It could even be, Wehr has theorised, that many of today’s common sleeping disorders are essentially the result of our older, primal habits “breaking through into today’s artificial world.’”
- Jon Henley, “The Dark Ages,” The Guardian (London), October 24, 2009
“But is it possible that such expectations are too much – that there never was such thing as a great night’s sleep? In pre-industrial Europe, for example, sleeping for eight consecutive hours wasn’t normal, American historian Roger Ekirch says. While in Britain to research his 2005 book, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, he discovered what he calls ‘segmented sleep.’ ‘The consolidated, seamless sleep we enjoy today was not the norm in the 19th century,’ he says on the phone from Virginia Tech, where he teaches. ‘There is no idyllic past in terms of sleep.’ Instead, people slept for two to three hours, surrounded by braying animals, people emitting terrible smells, and other environmental disturbances. They awoke at midnight for one or two hours, and then settled back down for a second ‘dawn’ slumber. In the interval, people stoked the fire, made love, prepared the next day’s meal, stole apples from the neighbours, prayed, meditated or reflected upon their dreams. ‘Basically, they did anything and everything imaginable,’ Prof. Ekirch says with a chuckle. His findings resonate with those of scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington D.C., who have conducted clinical research into segmented sleep and found that, without the interference of artificial light, many people naturally slept in two phases.‘Insomniacs may simply be experiencing this pre-industrial, once-dominant pattern of sleep,’ Prof. Ekirch says.”
- The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Nov. 15, 2008
“But to alter and really shake up our expectations – as one might renew a flattened eiderdown – we need the historian A Roger Ekirch to come to our aid. He explains (in At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime) that before the industrial revolution, it was the norm for people to sleep in two parts (a sort of sleep sandwich). In the middle – the filling – all manner of things went on. ‘Families rose to urinate, smoke tobacco, and even visit close neighbours. Many others made love, prayed, and, most important, historically, reflected on their dreams, a significant source of solace and self-awareness.’ It is an upbeat idea: the night as opportunity. But it is easier to imagine than to achieve.”
- Kate Kellaway, “Is Anxiety about Sleep Keeping Us All Awake?,” The Observer (London), April 27, 2008
“. . . fascinating historical and scientific research that challenges the consensus view of sleep as a continuous, consolidated 8-hour block of time. When University of Virginia [Virginia Tech] historian A. Roger Ekirch began researching sleep in pre-industrial societies he was surprised by hundreds of references to something called “first sleep” and a second or “morning sleep.” It seems as though before the advent of mass artificial lighting – with its attendant suite of late-night consumption opportunities – much of the Western world slept in two sections: once in the early evening, and once more in the early morning. In between our ancestors woke for several hours to a curious state of consciousness that had no name, other that the generic “watch” or “watching.” Ekirch’s historical evidence aligns with scientific findings from the respected National Institutes of Health chronobiologist Thomas Wehr. For one month Wehr had a group of volunteers spend the full duration of a 14-hour winter’s night in bed. Every one of the volunteers lapsed into a segmented sleep pattern. Although it took a succession of long winter nights to provoke this kind of sleep, when Wehr published his findings he speculated that segmented sleep may be the default physiological pattern for humans in general – certainly it matched similar patterns observed in modern forager cultures.”
- Jeff Warren, Huffington Post, April 25, 2008
“Research by Professor Ekirch revealed that in pre-industrial times, before electricity and gaslights, people typically slept in two bouts of four hours. There would be a gap of wakefulness in-between lasting about two hours. A similar result was found by sleep researchers in the nineties at the National Institute of Mental Health, when people were exposed to light that mimicked natural variations of day and night. So it may be comforting to know that your experience may not necessarily be abnormal, but possibly a remnant of normal mammalian evolution. Indeed some animals like chimpanzees and giraffes are reported to share the same sleep patterns.”
- Neel Halder, M.D., Royal College of Psychiatry, Manchester Evening News, March 3, 2008
“In ancient times, according to two recent histories of sleep, people probably slept no better than we insomniacs – they woke frequently to tend their animals or children, all snorting and snoring in the same sleeping space. Night was often a ghastly time. In some societies, sleep was broken into two four-hour shifts, with singing or other activities in-between. So people who wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back to sleep easily may be reverting to ancient patterns. ‘It’s the seamless sleep we aspire to that’s the anomaly, the creation of the modern world,’ Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close, told The New York Times recently.”
- Adele Horin, “Unravel the Sleeve of Care for a Decent Night’s Sleep,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 23, 2008
“In a provocative article last year in Applied Neurology, Dr. Walter Brown reviews historical descriptions of pre-industrial sleep and suggests that sleeping in two nightly shifts separated by an hour or two of quiet wakefulness is completely normal. I encourage you to read it. He proposes that the advent of inexpensive artificial light allowed us to stay awake long after sundown and has led us to be so chronically sleep deprived that we usually sleep for 7 uninterrupted hours nightly. This uninterrupted sleep pattern has now become the new norm. When our natural pattern of sleeping in two shifts reasserts itself, we find it abnormal and distressing. We are sure something is wrong, and a whole industry has sprung up to reinforce our anxiety and help us sleep the way we think we should. Our expectations about our bodies go a long way toward shaping what symptoms we find distressing and what we ignore. Many patients are quite alarmed about entirely normal symptoms and refuse to be reassured. But patients alone are not to be blamed. Many forces have pushed modern medicine to pathologize normal symptoms. After all, pharmaceutical companies sell prescriptions, not reassurance.”
- Albert Fuchs, M.D., Beverly Hills, California, Dec. 13, 2007, www.albertfuchs.com
“More surprising still, Ekirch reports that for many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night — divided into a ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’ — also included a curious intermission. ‘There was an extraordinary level of activity,’ Ekirch told me. People got up and tended to their animals or did housekeeping. Others had sex or just lay in bed thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with bedfellows. Benjamin Franklin took ‘cold-air baths,’ reading naked in a chair. Our conception of sleep as an unbroken block is so innate that it can seem inconceivable that people only two centuries ago should have experienced it so differently. Yet in an experiment at the National Institutes of Health a decade ago, men kept on a schedule of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness — mimicking the duration of day and night during winter — fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one to three hours of somnolence — just calmly lying there — in between. Some sleep disorders, namely waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep again, ‘may simply be this traditional pattern, this normal pattern, reasserting itself,’ Ekirch told me. ‘It’s the seamless sleep that we aspire to that’s the anomaly, the creation of the modern world.’”
- Jon Mooallem, “The Sleep-Industrial Complex, New York Times Magazine, November 18, 2007
“There seems little doubt that our sleep patterns have changed over the centuries, partly in response to technology. Research by Virginia Tech history professor A. Roger Ekirch suggests most western Europeans before the industrial revolution enjoyed ‘segmented sleep’ – they woke midway through the night to reflect on their dreams, smoke tobacco and even visit neighbours.”
- Peter Barber, “Snooze Function,” Financial Times (London), May 25, 2007
“Segmented or fragmented sleep appears in early times to have been the rule rather than exception, writes the American writer Walter Brown in a fascinating article in Scientific American Mind (January 2007). He cites the research of the historian Roger Ekirch, who in early literature discovered that before the invention of gaslight and electricity, most people in the evening and at night slept in two episodes. They called the episodes “first sleep” and “second sleep”. In effect, most people after sunset went to sleep for four hours and then woke up. They stayed awake a few hours and then went to sleep for four hours until sunrise. What did they do in the dark night hours? Everything, according to the literature. Household tasks that could be done by candlelight. Talk. Sometimes they even went to visit others. The hours were also often used for prayer, contemplation and reflection on the dreams of the first sleep. . . . Many people [today] awake in the middle of the night and then lie and worry about their loss of sleep. They try desperately to get back to sleep and even swallow sleeping pills to sleep through the night. Maybe they should do what their ancestors did: early to bed, awaken to do something useful or pleasant, and after a few hours go back to bed for the second sleep.”
- Elsevier (Amsterdam), March 14, 2007
“A recent discovery and a reexamination of some classic sleep literature suggest that for some people the perfect eight hours of sleep remains elusive for a very simple reason: our need for such uninterrupted slumber may be nothing but a fairy tale. The source of this new assault on conventional thinking comes not from a drug company lab or a university research program but from a historian.”
- Walter A. Brown, “Ancient Sleep in Modern Time,” Scientific American Mind, December 2006/January 2007
“Recently I had reason to think about varieties of sleep and dreams – historians’ dreams of the past, writers’ dreams of their subject, dreamers in the past. The occasion was a conference that included sleep researchers in neuroscience; and the inspiration was a marvelous essay on the history of sleep by the early modern historian A. Roger Ekirch. It’s not a subject that comes naturally. Ekirch points out historians’ generic preference for vigorous actors: ‘our entire history is only the history of waking men’. . . . Ekirch explicates this historical ‘bias’ in favour of active, animated protagonists and against dull sleepers: ‘Whereas our waking hours are animated, volatile, and highly differentiated, sleep appears, by contrast, passive, monotonous, and uneventful’”.
- Christine Stansell, History Workshop Journal, Autumn 2006
“The study fits what may be an ancient human pattern, according to findings of historian A. Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech, author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. “The dominant pattern in the Western world until the Industrial Revolution was not seamless sleep, but segmented sleep,” he says. Diaries and literary references going back to Homer referred to ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep,’ each about four hours. In between, in the dark of night, people would talk, use the chamber pot, slap at fleas and lice, be on the alert for predators and have sex, he says. Most people’s real lives no longer allow for that human pattern of natural sleep.”
- Susan Brink, “After You Close Your Eyes,” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 2006
“Before the invention of the electric light and the normalization of clock time, humans slept quite differently. In a review of Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, David Wooton notes how the sleep of our ancestors was divided each night into two separate periods. After the “first” sleep people woke, read, talked, prayed, made love and so on. Wooton observes that ‘everyone knew the difference between first and second sleep, and no-one expected to sleep right through.’ By contrast, our own sleep, mediated by artificial rhythms and technological stimulation, all too often requires medicinal or narcotic supplements to get us through the night.”
- Simon Cooper, Arena Magazine (Victoria, Australia), June-July, 2006
“Everyone who reads and writes about Ekirch’s book seems very taken by his re-discovery of the fact that our notion of one continuous, seamless nighttime sleep (leaving our people in our pictures and our teddy bears free to play in peace) is just a modern trend and an artificial, unnatural imposition against the wills of our bodies and minds.”
- I. Warden, “Warden’s World,” Canberra Times, June 30, 2006
“The discoveries of Ekirch and [Thomas] Wehr raise the possibility that segmented sleep is ‘normal’ and, as such, these revelations hold significant implications for both understanding sleep and the treatment of insomnia.”
- Walter A. Brown, “Acknowledging Preindustrial Patterns of Sleep May Revolutionize Approach to Sleep Dysfunction,” Applied Neurology, May 2006.
“One of the many revelations in A. Roger Ekirch’s historical investigation of night-time, At Day’s Close, is the demonstration that until the modern age, segmented sleep was more common than the straight eight-hour stretch. Premoderns used to go to bed at nightfall for their “first sleep,” then rise again around or after midnight for a tenebral intermezzo of reading, talking, sex, or, if they were unlucky, household chores, before retiring again for another few hours of slumber.”
- Harry Eyres, Financial Times, May 13, 2006
“So here’s a question: Is the proverbial good night’s sleep really the Holy Grail of human well-being? In his 2005 book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, historian A.Roger Ekirch said no. He argued that the transition from old-fashioned “segmented sleep” to today’s continuous sleep pattern hasn’t helped mankind. ‘There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a provenance as old as humankind,’ Ekirch wrote. Up until the invention of artificial lighting, he noted, men and women went to bed earlier and woke up in the middle of the night to smoke a pipe, make love, or analyze their dreams. Now we sleep when we want to and fitfully, at best.”
- Alex Beam, “Perchance to Sleep,” Boston Globe, April 10, 2006
“A recent article by A. Roger Ekirch, a professor of history and author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, caught my eye. In it he challenges the concepts of the patterns of sleep which we now accept as normal. . . . We now find ourselves battling against nature to get what we see as our rightful share of sleep. Forced into an unnatural sleep pattern, many people seek refuge in the sedative effects of alcohol and hypnotics to restore this artificial pattern may in fact just be a more natural form of segmented sleep, just as nature intended. . . . So perhaps it’s time to re-educate ourselves and our patients about what is ‘normal’ when it comes to slumber.”
- Muiris Houston, M.D., Medicine Weekly (Dublin), March 15, 2006
“Sleep patterns around the world have undergone a revolution over the past two centuries as the spread of artificial lighting profoundly changed the shape of human lives, first in cities and now even in many remote villages. Throughout most of history sundown brought an end to the activities in most homes, with people crawling into bed soon afterwards. A. Roger Ekirch—author of a magisterial history of nighttime, At Day’s Close (Norton)— argues that the very nature of a night’s rest has changed since the Industrial Revolution. Sleep for our ancestors was often divided into two shifts of roughly four hours, with a period of wakefulness lasting an hour or longer in between. A study conducted by the U.S. government’s National Institute of Mental Health appears to confirm Ekirch’s thesis.”
- Jay Walljasper, Ode Magazine, November 2005
“Ekirch’s research on nighttime led to the surprising discovery, laid out in his recent book, At Day’s Close: Night In Times Past, about humanity’s frequent nightly pastime, sleep. Ekirch learned that, before artificial light, humans had a “first sleep” of two to three hours, followed by a one- to two-hour long period of wakefulness and then several more hours of sleep. He found references to this pattern of segmented or broken sleep in numerous references, even the Aeneid and Homer’s Odyssey. ‘So it was for hundreds, probably thousands of years,’ he said. ‘Beginning in the late 17th century, segmented slumber gradually grew less common’ with the increasing popularity of artificial illumination and a goal of eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. This ‘altered circadian rhythms as old as humanity itself.’”
- A.J. Hostetler, “Is the Nighttime Losing its Identity,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 28, 2005
“But surely sleep itself, when it did come, was just like our sleep, wasn’t it? In one of the most fascinating sections of a fascinating book, Ekirch demonstrates how differently our forebears slept their eight hours a night. After “breeches-off” time, the “customary term for nine o’ clock in parts of Germany,” the sleepers fell into their ‘first sleep,’ which usually lasted till midnight or so. Then they roused to urinate, have sex, mull over their dreams and share intimate conversation with their spouses. The educated might use the time to read and study by candlelight, while farmers might check on their livestock and women might get up to ‘rock the cradle, also to card and comb wool, to patch and to wash, to rub flax and reel yarn and peel rushes.’ Others, industrious after a different fashion, found it a good time to slip out and poach game, steal firewood, rob orchards and perhaps practice magic. Most people, though, probably talked a while, performed a task or two, and then slipped into their ‘second sleep’ till cock-crow. This two-part pattern of sleep is, Ekirch says, still typical in the part of the world where artificial light has not arrived.”
- Andrew Hudgins, “Laughter in the Dark,” Raleigh News & Observer, July 31, 2005
“A wonderful section, for example, describes the practice of segmented sleep: before the industrial age, people often slept for a few hours after dinner, then woke after midnight to engage in restful contemplation and prayer, conversation or sex, and then resumed sleeping until daybreak. ‘Regenerate man finds no time so fit to raise his soul to Heaven, as when he awakes at mid-night,’ wrote the author of ‘Mid-Night Thoughts” in 1682.’”
- Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York Times, July 24, 2005
“The discussion of sleep patterns is especially interesting. ‘There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a provenance as old as humankind,’ Ekirch writes. People went to bed early and awoke around midnight. Some got up for awhile; most probably lay in bed thinking, dozing, or talking with their bedmate, before falling asleep for another four hours or so. This interval of wakefulness may have boosted birth rates among the laboring classes, Ekirch says.”
- Fritz Lanham, “Nighttime as Fright Time,” Houston Chronicle, June 26, 2005
“Perhaps the strangest revelation of Ekirch’s book is the fact that our forebears, far from enjoying a dark night’s sleep uninterrupted by neighbours’ security lights or car alarms, found themselves prey, not only to shouts of ‘murder’ in the streets and fears of thieves or the more spectral intruders of their imaginations, but also to waking regularly at midnight – their rest being separated into ‘first sleep” and “second sleep’. It was a habitual but natural division of the night which only modern lighting would change (by keeping us awake until late), and it is just one of the many facts in this engrossing book that illuminate the darker recesses of the past.”
- Philip Hoare, Sunday Telegraph (London), June 19, 2005
“We no longer sleep as nature intended us to – in two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of wakefulness, asserts Ekirch. In the older age more attuned to inner clocks, not only was sleep segmented but that fragmentation of sleep made us more responsive to the our subconscious, he aver; people apparently awoke after midnight and, instead of tossing and turning, they regularly got up to talk, study, pray and do chores. The historian has dug up literary and epistolary references to the so-called first sleep or primo somno and the second sleep, which is sometimes referred to as ‘morning sleep’. Worse, he warns that by substituting this episodic sleep with a shorter, seamless slumber, we have committed a crime against nature. “By turning night into day,” he writes, “modern technology has helped to obstruct our oldest path to the human psyche.”
- Lola Chantal, “Is ‘Wakeful’ Sleep More Soulful?” Economic Times (Mumbai), May 30, 2005
“Strikingly, [Ekirch] addresses at length the once commonly accepted notion of “first sleep,” an initial and distinct period of deep and restful sleep that was fully expected to be followed by an interval of wakefulness before the remainder of the night’s sleep, referred to as “second sleep” or “morning sleep.” This pattern of sleep was widely recognized, as is demonstrated by Ekirch’s compendious list of medical, literary, and popular sources referencing the term in English, French, and Italian from before the 13th century through the 19th century. This was considered a normal and unproblematic sleep pattern. There is no particular mention in print of waking in the middle of the night as undesirable or pathologic. Quite the contrary, Ekirch located scores of references in journals and diaries to the peacefulness and meditative appeal of this waking period.”
- Oskar G. Jenni and Bonnie B. O’Connor, “Children’s Sleep: An Interplay between Culture and Biology,” Pediatrics: Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, January 2005
“Studies of Western Europeans by historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg show that “segmented sleep” was a common practice of rural and urban people 200-55 years ago.”
- Tim Batchelder, “The Cultural Biology of Sleep,” Townshend Letter for Doctors and Patients, July 2002
“But there is magic, too, in the unlit night, a loosening of the temporal and physical boundaries that bind us by day. Ekirch uncovered multiple references to ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’ in historical records; he theorizes that once we slept in two roughly equal interludes, split by a period of quiet wakefulness in which dreams were contemplated and prayers offered. This creative window closed gradually during the 19th century, as gas lamps became common and human sleep patterns consolidated.”
- Kate Terwilliger, Denver Post, April 6, 2001
“One of Ekirch’s discoveries surprised him: in the pre-electric centuries, people slept differently. We assume it is normal to slumber more or less continuously through the night. We think of wakefulness as a disorder–insomnia. And common sense suggests that, without electric lights, our preindustrial ancestors must have slept from sunset to sunrise. But Ekirch has found that was not so. Preindustrial people’s sleep was segmented. They might lie an hour or more before falling asleep. About four hours later, they would awaken. For another hour or so, they would lie meditating on their dreams or praying. They would talk with bedmates. They might even visit neighbors, similarly awake. They might pilfer or poach. Then they would sleep another four hours or so. People, as a matter of course, routinely referred to their first sleep and their second sleep.”
- Joyce and Richard Wolkomir, Smithsonian, January 2001
“Our ancestors, living before electric lighting, probably didn’t get that sleep all at once. Waking with the sun and retiring for the day when darkness fell, they had plenty of time in bed, and historian A. Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech has found that they slept in two segments. References as far back as Virgil and Homer called it ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep.’ In between was an hour or two of quiet wakefulness that our ancestors sometimes called ‘the watch.’ It was a time to ponder dreams and plot wars.”
- Susan Brink, “Sleepless Society,” U.S. New and World Report, October 8, 2000.
“In other times, what is more, people may have slept differently. Roger Ekirch, a history professor at Virginia Polytechnic in the US, is currently finishing a book about nocturnal British life between 1500 and 1850. He has discovered ‘hundreds’ of references, he says, in people’s diaries and letters and court statements, to sleeping routines that now sound quite alien. ‘Most households,’ he says, ‘experienced a pattern of broken sleep.’ People went to bed at nine or 10. They awakened after midnight, after what they called their ‘first sleep’ stayed conscious for an hour, and then had their ‘morning sleep’. The interlude was a haven for reflection, remembering dreams, having sex, or even night-time thievery. The poorest, Ekirch says, were the greatest beneficiaries, fleetingly freed from the constraints and labours that ruled their daytime existence. By the 17th century, as artificial light became more common, the rich were already switching to the more concentrated – and economically efficient – mode of recuperation that we follow today. The industrial revolution pushed back the dusk for everyone except pockets of country-dwellers.”
- Andy Beckett, Guardian, August 10, 1999
Roger Ekirch | Department of History
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“And I have found evolutionary and historical precedent for my sleep cycles. Just the other day I spoke with Roger Ekirch, a Virginia Tech historian who has focused on sleep in Western cultures and has written At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. He told me that in the preindustrial era, before the proliferation of modern lighting, people routinely used to wake from their ‘first sleep’ sometime after midnight to talk with others, smoke a pipe, rob the nearby orchard or bring in the cows. After about an hour, he said, people returned to bed for their ‘second sleep’ until dawn. ‘It makes perfect sense if you accept the premise that segmented sleep was the dominant form of slumber before the Industrial Revolution,’ Ekirch said. ‘It makes perfect sense that a biological pattern since time immemorial would not relinquish its hold easily, that it would not fade rapidly into the mists of history. The process instead would be prolonged and erratic. Consolidated sleep is an artificial invention of modern life.’”
- Laura Hambleton, “An Insomniac Learns to Make the Most of Getting the Least Sleep,” The Washington Post, February 14, 2011
“But what’s interesting is that in some of the research that’s come out, particularly Roger Ekirch’s book, his history of the night, he talks about before the invention of electric light, people slept in segmented sleep. They would sleep for a few hours, they’d be up for several hours, and then they’d be – fall back asleep again. So in many respects that sleep pattern is fairly natural.”
- Patricia Morrisroe, NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” May 4, 2010
“But is insomnia a modern problem? Are we sleeping less than we used to? Did people in prehistoric and ancient times really crash with the sunset and sleep til the cocks crowed? Is the prescribed eight hours a construct to suit industrial times? In his 2005 ground-breaking book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, American historian Roger Ekirch documented how humans slept through the ages — but not necessarily through the night. ‘He said that people slept in segmented sleep,’’ says [Patricia] Morrisroe. ‘They’d fall asleep for a couple of hours. They’d get up. They might talk. They might have sex with their bedfellows as there were often multiple people in beds because they often had communal beds. They’d pray. They would analyze their dreams. Maybe some would go out and steal livestock. Then they would go back to sleep. So this concept of segmented sleep may be very natural to us.’’’
- Antonia Zerbislas, Toronto Star, May 1, 2010
“Ekirch relates, in perhaps his most fascinating revelation, pre-industrial man slept a segmented sleep. He has found more than 500 references, from Homer onwards, to a ‘first sleep’ that lasted until maybe midnight, and was followed by ‘second sleep’. In between the two, people routinely got up, peed, smoked, read, chatted, had friends round, or simply reflected on the events of the previous day – and on their dreams. (Plenty also had sex, by all accounts far more satisfactorily than at the end of a hard day’s labouring. Couples who copulated ‘after the first sleep, wrote a 16th-century French doctor, ‘have more enjoyment, and do it better’.) Experiments by Dr Thomas Wehr at America’s National Institute of Mental Health appear to bear out the theory that this two-part slumber is man’s natural sleeping pattern: a group of young male volunteers deprived of light at night for weeks at a time rapidly fell into the segmented sleep routine described in so many of Ekirch’s documentary sources. It could even be, Wehr has theorised, that many of today’s common sleeping disorders are essentially the result of our older, primal habits “breaking through into today’s artificial world.’”
- Jon Henley, “The Dark Ages,” The Guardian (London), October 24, 2009
“But is it possible that such expectations are too much – that there never was such thing as a great night’s sleep? In pre-industrial Europe, for example, sleeping for eight consecutive hours wasn’t normal, American historian Roger Ekirch says. While in Britain to research his 2005 book, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, he discovered what he calls ‘segmented sleep.’ ‘The consolidated, seamless sleep we enjoy today was not the norm in the 19th century,’ he says on the phone from Virginia Tech, where he teaches. ‘There is no idyllic past in terms of sleep.’ Instead, people slept for two to three hours, surrounded by braying animals, people emitting terrible smells, and other environmental disturbances. They awoke at midnight for one or two hours, and then settled back down for a second ‘dawn’ slumber. In the interval, people stoked the fire, made love, prepared the next day’s meal, stole apples from the neighbours, prayed, meditated or reflected upon their dreams. ‘Basically, they did anything and everything imaginable,’ Prof. Ekirch says with a chuckle. His findings resonate with those of scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington D.C., who have conducted clinical research into segmented sleep and found that, without the interference of artificial light, many people naturally slept in two phases.‘Insomniacs may simply be experiencing this pre-industrial, once-dominant pattern of sleep,’ Prof. Ekirch says.”
- The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Nov. 15, 2008
“But to alter and really shake up our expectations – as one might renew a flattened eiderdown – we need the historian A Roger Ekirch to come to our aid. He explains (in At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime) that before the industrial revolution, it was the norm for people to sleep in two parts (a sort of sleep sandwich). In the middle – the filling – all manner of things went on. ‘Families rose to urinate, smoke tobacco, and even visit close neighbours. Many others made love, prayed, and, most important, historically, reflected on their dreams, a significant source of solace and self-awareness.’ It is an upbeat idea: the night as opportunity. But it is easier to imagine than to achieve.”
- Kate Kellaway, “Is Anxiety about Sleep Keeping Us All Awake?,” The Observer (London), April 27, 2008
“. . . fascinating historical and scientific research that challenges the consensus view of sleep as a continuous, consolidated 8-hour block of time. When University of Virginia [Virginia Tech] historian A. Roger Ekirch began researching sleep in pre-industrial societies he was surprised by hundreds of references to something called “first sleep” and a second or “morning sleep.” It seems as though before the advent of mass artificial lighting – with its attendant suite of late-night consumption opportunities – much of the Western world slept in two sections: once in the early evening, and once more in the early morning. In between our ancestors woke for several hours to a curious state of consciousness that had no name, other that the generic “watch” or “watching.” Ekirch’s historical evidence aligns with scientific findings from the respected National Institutes of Health chronobiologist Thomas Wehr. For one month Wehr had a group of volunteers spend the full duration of a 14-hour winter’s night in bed. Every one of the volunteers lapsed into a segmented sleep pattern. Although it took a succession of long winter nights to provoke this kind of sleep, when Wehr published his findings he speculated that segmented sleep may be the default physiological pattern for humans in general – certainly it matched similar patterns observed in modern forager cultures.”
- Jeff Warren, Huffington Post, April 25, 2008
“Research by Professor Ekirch revealed that in pre-industrial times, before electricity and gaslights, people typically slept in two bouts of four hours. There would be a gap of wakefulness in-between lasting about two hours. A similar result was found by sleep researchers in the nineties at the National Institute of Mental Health, when people were exposed to light that mimicked natural variations of day and night. So it may be comforting to know that your experience may not necessarily be abnormal, but possibly a remnant of normal mammalian evolution. Indeed some animals like chimpanzees and giraffes are reported to share the same sleep patterns.”
- Neel Halder, M.D., Royal College of Psychiatry, Manchester Evening News, March 3, 2008
“In ancient times, according to two recent histories of sleep, people probably slept no better than we insomniacs – they woke frequently to tend their animals or children, all snorting and snoring in the same sleeping space. Night was often a ghastly time. In some societies, sleep was broken into two four-hour shifts, with singing or other activities in-between. So people who wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back to sleep easily may be reverting to ancient patterns. ‘It’s the seamless sleep we aspire to that’s the anomaly, the creation of the modern world,’ Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close, told The New York Times recently.”
- Adele Horin, “Unravel the Sleeve of Care for a Decent Night’s Sleep,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 23, 2008
“In a provocative article last year in Applied Neurology, Dr. Walter Brown reviews historical descriptions of pre-industrial sleep and suggests that sleeping in two nightly shifts separated by an hour or two of quiet wakefulness is completely normal. I encourage you to read it. He proposes that the advent of inexpensive artificial light allowed us to stay awake long after sundown and has led us to be so chronically sleep deprived that we usually sleep for 7 uninterrupted hours nightly. This uninterrupted sleep pattern has now become the new norm. When our natural pattern of sleeping in two shifts reasserts itself, we find it abnormal and distressing. We are sure something is wrong, and a whole industry has sprung up to reinforce our anxiety and help us sleep the way we think we should. Our expectations about our bodies go a long way toward shaping what symptoms we find distressing and what we ignore. Many patients are quite alarmed about entirely normal symptoms and refuse to be reassured. But patients alone are not to be blamed. Many forces have pushed modern medicine to pathologize normal symptoms. After all, pharmaceutical companies sell prescriptions, not reassurance.”
- Albert Fuchs, M.D., Beverly Hills, California, Dec. 13, 2007, www.albertfuchs.com
“More surprising still, Ekirch reports that for many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night — divided into a ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’ — also included a curious intermission. ‘There was an extraordinary level of activity,’ Ekirch told me. People got up and tended to their animals or did housekeeping. Others had sex or just lay in bed thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with bedfellows. Benjamin Franklin took ‘cold-air baths,’ reading naked in a chair. Our conception of sleep as an unbroken block is so innate that it can seem inconceivable that people only two centuries ago should have experienced it so differently. Yet in an experiment at the National Institutes of Health a decade ago, men kept on a schedule of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness — mimicking the duration of day and night during winter — fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one to three hours of somnolence — just calmly lying there — in between. Some sleep disorders, namely waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep again, ‘may simply be this traditional pattern, this normal pattern, reasserting itself,’ Ekirch told me. ‘It’s the seamless sleep that we aspire to that’s the anomaly, the creation of the modern world.’”
- Jon Mooallem, “The Sleep-Industrial Complex, New York Times Magazine, November 18, 2007
“There seems little doubt that our sleep patterns have changed over the centuries, partly in response to technology. Research by Virginia Tech history professor A. Roger Ekirch suggests most western Europeans before the industrial revolution enjoyed ‘segmented sleep’ – they woke midway through the night to reflect on their dreams, smoke tobacco and even visit neighbours.”
- Peter Barber, “Snooze Function,” Financial Times (London), May 25, 2007
“Segmented or fragmented sleep appears in early times to have been the rule rather than exception, writes the American writer Walter Brown in a fascinating article in Scientific American Mind (January 2007). He cites the research of the historian Roger Ekirch, who in early literature discovered that before the invention of gaslight and electricity, most people in the evening and at night slept in two episodes. They called the episodes “first sleep” and “second sleep”. In effect, most people after sunset went to sleep for four hours and then woke up. They stayed awake a few hours and then went to sleep for four hours until sunrise. What did they do in the dark night hours? Everything, according to the literature. Household tasks that could be done by candlelight. Talk. Sometimes they even went to visit others. The hours were also often used for prayer, contemplation and reflection on the dreams of the first sleep. . . . Many people [today] awake in the middle of the night and then lie and worry about their loss of sleep. They try desperately to get back to sleep and even swallow sleeping pills to sleep through the night. Maybe they should do what their ancestors did: early to bed, awaken to do something useful or pleasant, and after a few hours go back to bed for the second sleep.”
- Elsevier (Amsterdam), March 14, 2007
“A recent discovery and a reexamination of some classic sleep literature suggest that for some people the perfect eight hours of sleep remains elusive for a very simple reason: our need for such uninterrupted slumber may be nothing but a fairy tale. The source of this new assault on conventional thinking comes not from a drug company lab or a university research program but from a historian.”
- Walter A. Brown, “Ancient Sleep in Modern Time,” Scientific American Mind, December 2006/January 2007
“Recently I had reason to think about varieties of sleep and dreams – historians’ dreams of the past, writers’ dreams of their subject, dreamers in the past. The occasion was a conference that included sleep researchers in neuroscience; and the inspiration was a marvelous essay on the history of sleep by the early modern historian A. Roger Ekirch. It’s not a subject that comes naturally. Ekirch points out historians’ generic preference for vigorous actors: ‘our entire history is only the history of waking men’. . . . Ekirch explicates this historical ‘bias’ in favour of active, animated protagonists and against dull sleepers: ‘Whereas our waking hours are animated, volatile, and highly differentiated, sleep appears, by contrast, passive, monotonous, and uneventful’”.
- Christine Stansell, History Workshop Journal, Autumn 2006
“The study fits what may be an ancient human pattern, according to findings of historian A. Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech, author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. “The dominant pattern in the Western world until the Industrial Revolution was not seamless sleep, but segmented sleep,” he says. Diaries and literary references going back to Homer referred to ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep,’ each about four hours. In between, in the dark of night, people would talk, use the chamber pot, slap at fleas and lice, be on the alert for predators and have sex, he says. Most people’s real lives no longer allow for that human pattern of natural sleep.”
- Susan Brink, “After You Close Your Eyes,” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 2006
“Before the invention of the electric light and the normalization of clock time, humans slept quite differently. In a review of Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, David Wooton notes how the sleep of our ancestors was divided each night into two separate periods. After the “first” sleep people woke, read, talked, prayed, made love and so on. Wooton observes that ‘everyone knew the difference between first and second sleep, and no-one expected to sleep right through.’ By contrast, our own sleep, mediated by artificial rhythms and technological stimulation, all too often requires medicinal or narcotic supplements to get us through the night.”
- Simon Cooper, Arena Magazine (Victoria, Australia), June-July, 2006
“Everyone who reads and writes about Ekirch’s book seems very taken by his re-discovery of the fact that our notion of one continuous, seamless nighttime sleep (leaving our people in our pictures and our teddy bears free to play in peace) is just a modern trend and an artificial, unnatural imposition against the wills of our bodies and minds.”
- I. Warden, “Warden’s World,” Canberra Times, June 30, 2006
“The discoveries of Ekirch and [Thomas] Wehr raise the possibility that segmented sleep is ‘normal’ and, as such, these revelations hold significant implications for both understanding sleep and the treatment of insomnia.”
- Walter A. Brown, “Acknowledging Preindustrial Patterns of Sleep May Revolutionize Approach to Sleep Dysfunction,” Applied Neurology, May 2006.
“One of the many revelations in A. Roger Ekirch’s historical investigation of night-time, At Day’s Close, is the demonstration that until the modern age, segmented sleep was more common than the straight eight-hour stretch. Premoderns used to go to bed at nightfall for their “first sleep,” then rise again around or after midnight for a tenebral intermezzo of reading, talking, sex, or, if they were unlucky, household chores, before retiring again for another few hours of slumber.”
- Harry Eyres, Financial Times, May 13, 2006
“So here’s a question: Is the proverbial good night’s sleep really the Holy Grail of human well-being? In his 2005 book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, historian A.Roger Ekirch said no. He argued that the transition from old-fashioned “segmented sleep” to today’s continuous sleep pattern hasn’t helped mankind. ‘There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a provenance as old as humankind,’ Ekirch wrote. Up until the invention of artificial lighting, he noted, men and women went to bed earlier and woke up in the middle of the night to smoke a pipe, make love, or analyze their dreams. Now we sleep when we want to and fitfully, at best.”
- Alex Beam, “Perchance to Sleep,” Boston Globe, April 10, 2006
“A recent article by A. Roger Ekirch, a professor of history and author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, caught my eye. In it he challenges the concepts of the patterns of sleep which we now accept as normal. . . . We now find ourselves battling against nature to get what we see as our rightful share of sleep. Forced into an unnatural sleep pattern, many people seek refuge in the sedative effects of alcohol and hypnotics to restore this artificial pattern may in fact just be a more natural form of segmented sleep, just as nature intended. . . . So perhaps it’s time to re-educate ourselves and our patients about what is ‘normal’ when it comes to slumber.”
- Muiris Houston, M.D., Medicine Weekly (Dublin), March 15, 2006
“Sleep patterns around the world have undergone a revolution over the past two centuries as the spread of artificial lighting profoundly changed the shape of human lives, first in cities and now even in many remote villages. Throughout most of history sundown brought an end to the activities in most homes, with people crawling into bed soon afterwards. A. Roger Ekirch—author of a magisterial history of nighttime, At Day’s Close (Norton)— argues that the very nature of a night’s rest has changed since the Industrial Revolution. Sleep for our ancestors was often divided into two shifts of roughly four hours, with a period of wakefulness lasting an hour or longer in between. A study conducted by the U.S. government’s National Institute of Mental Health appears to confirm Ekirch’s thesis.”
- Jay Walljasper, Ode Magazine, November 2005
“Ekirch’s research on nighttime led to the surprising discovery, laid out in his recent book, At Day’s Close: Night In Times Past, about humanity’s frequent nightly pastime, sleep. Ekirch learned that, before artificial light, humans had a “first sleep” of two to three hours, followed by a one- to two-hour long period of wakefulness and then several more hours of sleep. He found references to this pattern of segmented or broken sleep in numerous references, even the Aeneid and Homer’s Odyssey. ‘So it was for hundreds, probably thousands of years,’ he said. ‘Beginning in the late 17th century, segmented slumber gradually grew less common’ with the increasing popularity of artificial illumination and a goal of eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. This ‘altered circadian rhythms as old as humanity itself.’”
- A.J. Hostetler, “Is the Nighttime Losing its Identity,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 28, 2005
“But surely sleep itself, when it did come, was just like our sleep, wasn’t it? In one of the most fascinating sections of a fascinating book, Ekirch demonstrates how differently our forebears slept their eight hours a night. After “breeches-off” time, the “customary term for nine o’ clock in parts of Germany,” the sleepers fell into their ‘first sleep,’ which usually lasted till midnight or so. Then they roused to urinate, have sex, mull over their dreams and share intimate conversation with their spouses. The educated might use the time to read and study by candlelight, while farmers might check on their livestock and women might get up to ‘rock the cradle, also to card and comb wool, to patch and to wash, to rub flax and reel yarn and peel rushes.’ Others, industrious after a different fashion, found it a good time to slip out and poach game, steal firewood, rob orchards and perhaps practice magic. Most people, though, probably talked a while, performed a task or two, and then slipped into their ‘second sleep’ till cock-crow. This two-part pattern of sleep is, Ekirch says, still typical in the part of the world where artificial light has not arrived.”
- Andrew Hudgins, “Laughter in the Dark,” Raleigh News & Observer, July 31, 2005
“A wonderful section, for example, describes the practice of segmented sleep: before the industrial age, people often slept for a few hours after dinner, then woke after midnight to engage in restful contemplation and prayer, conversation or sex, and then resumed sleeping until daybreak. ‘Regenerate man finds no time so fit to raise his soul to Heaven, as when he awakes at mid-night,’ wrote the author of ‘Mid-Night Thoughts” in 1682.’”
- Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York Times, July 24, 2005
“The discussion of sleep patterns is especially interesting. ‘There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a provenance as old as humankind,’ Ekirch writes. People went to bed early and awoke around midnight. Some got up for awhile; most probably lay in bed thinking, dozing, or talking with their bedmate, before falling asleep for another four hours or so. This interval of wakefulness may have boosted birth rates among the laboring classes, Ekirch says.”
- Fritz Lanham, “Nighttime as Fright Time,” Houston Chronicle, June 26, 2005
“Perhaps the strangest revelation of Ekirch’s book is the fact that our forebears, far from enjoying a dark night’s sleep uninterrupted by neighbours’ security lights or car alarms, found themselves prey, not only to shouts of ‘murder’ in the streets and fears of thieves or the more spectral intruders of their imaginations, but also to waking regularly at midnight – their rest being separated into ‘first sleep” and “second sleep’. It was a habitual but natural division of the night which only modern lighting would change (by keeping us awake until late), and it is just one of the many facts in this engrossing book that illuminate the darker recesses of the past.”
- Philip Hoare, Sunday Telegraph (London), June 19, 2005
“We no longer sleep as nature intended us to – in two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of wakefulness, asserts Ekirch. In the older age more attuned to inner clocks, not only was sleep segmented but that fragmentation of sleep made us more responsive to the our subconscious, he aver; people apparently awoke after midnight and, instead of tossing and turning, they regularly got up to talk, study, pray and do chores. The historian has dug up literary and epistolary references to the so-called first sleep or primo somno and the second sleep, which is sometimes referred to as ‘morning sleep’. Worse, he warns that by substituting this episodic sleep with a shorter, seamless slumber, we have committed a crime against nature. “By turning night into day,” he writes, “modern technology has helped to obstruct our oldest path to the human psyche.”
- Lola Chantal, “Is ‘Wakeful’ Sleep More Soulful?” Economic Times (Mumbai), May 30, 2005
“Strikingly, [Ekirch] addresses at length the once commonly accepted notion of “first sleep,” an initial and distinct period of deep and restful sleep that was fully expected to be followed by an interval of wakefulness before the remainder of the night’s sleep, referred to as “second sleep” or “morning sleep.” This pattern of sleep was widely recognized, as is demonstrated by Ekirch’s compendious list of medical, literary, and popular sources referencing the term in English, French, and Italian from before the 13th century through the 19th century. This was considered a normal and unproblematic sleep pattern. There is no particular mention in print of waking in the middle of the night as undesirable or pathologic. Quite the contrary, Ekirch located scores of references in journals and diaries to the peacefulness and meditative appeal of this waking period.”
- Oskar G. Jenni and Bonnie B. O’Connor, “Children’s Sleep: An Interplay between Culture and Biology,” Pediatrics: Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, January 2005
“Studies of Western Europeans by historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg show that “segmented sleep” was a common practice of rural and urban people 200-55 years ago.”
- Tim Batchelder, “The Cultural Biology of Sleep,” Townshend Letter for Doctors and Patients, July 2002
“But there is magic, too, in the unlit night, a loosening of the temporal and physical boundaries that bind us by day. Ekirch uncovered multiple references to ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’ in historical records; he theorizes that once we slept in two roughly equal interludes, split by a period of quiet wakefulness in which dreams were contemplated and prayers offered. This creative window closed gradually during the 19th century, as gas lamps became common and human sleep patterns consolidated.”
- Kate Terwilliger, Denver Post, April 6, 2001
“One of Ekirch’s discoveries surprised him: in the pre-electric centuries, people slept differently. We assume it is normal to slumber more or less continuously through the night. We think of wakefulness as a disorder–insomnia. And common sense suggests that, without electric lights, our preindustrial ancestors must have slept from sunset to sunrise. But Ekirch has found that was not so. Preindustrial people’s sleep was segmented. They might lie an hour or more before falling asleep. About four hours later, they would awaken. For another hour or so, they would lie meditating on their dreams or praying. They would talk with bedmates. They might even visit neighbors, similarly awake. They might pilfer or poach. Then they would sleep another four hours or so. People, as a matter of course, routinely referred to their first sleep and their second sleep.”
- Joyce and Richard Wolkomir, Smithsonian, January 2001
“Our ancestors, living before electric lighting, probably didn’t get that sleep all at once. Waking with the sun and retiring for the day when darkness fell, they had plenty of time in bed, and historian A. Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech has found that they slept in two segments. References as far back as Virgil and Homer called it ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep.’ In between was an hour or two of quiet wakefulness that our ancestors sometimes called ‘the watch.’ It was a time to ponder dreams and plot wars.”
- Susan Brink, “Sleepless Society,” U.S. New and World Report, October 8, 2000.
“In other times, what is more, people may have slept differently. Roger Ekirch, a history professor at Virginia Polytechnic in the US, is currently finishing a book about nocturnal British life between 1500 and 1850. He has discovered ‘hundreds’ of references, he says, in people’s diaries and letters and court statements, to sleeping routines that now sound quite alien. ‘Most households,’ he says, ‘experienced a pattern of broken sleep.’ People went to bed at nine or 10. They awakened after midnight, after what they called their ‘first sleep’ stayed conscious for an hour, and then had their ‘morning sleep’. The interlude was a haven for reflection, remembering dreams, having sex, or even night-time thievery. The poorest, Ekirch says, were the greatest beneficiaries, fleetingly freed from the constraints and labours that ruled their daytime existence. By the 17th century, as artificial light became more common, the rich were already switching to the more concentrated – and economically efficient – mode of recuperation that we follow today. The industrial revolution pushed back the dusk for everyone except pockets of country-dwellers.”
- Andy Beckett, Guardian, August 10, 1999
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Lohner produced a number of hybrid petrol- electric cars. That is, with a petrol (gasoline US) engine driving a generator to produce the electricity to drive the electric motors.
His probably 
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