
I am a huge fan of “The Writer’s Almanac” — Garrison Keillor’s daily, five-minute radio broadcast (my local public radio station plays it at 8:35 a.m.; others may broadcast it at a different time), which always features fascinating tidbits about writers and historical and fictional figures, and always ends with a poem. There is almost always some fascinating tidbit of information to be gleaned from the production. Did you know, for instance, that when the King James Version of the Bible was produced, words like “thee” and “thou” and “sayeth” had already gone out of fashion in England, but the translators wanted the language of the Bible to sound old, like long ago and far away? A fact I never would have known but for the Writer’s Almanac.
I was floored by today’s factoid. It was on this day in 1879 that Thomas Edison finally struck upon the idea for a workable electric light, some 60 years after inventors had first tried to create one. Edison was the first to design a filament that would work and last and glow bright enough. That’s not the factoid. This is:
One of the effects of the invention of the electric light is that people sleep less than they once did. Before 1910, people slept an average of nine hours a night; since then, it’s about seven and a half. Sleep researchers have shown in the laboratory that if people are deprived of electric light, they will go back to the nine-hour-a-night schedule.
Who woulda thunk it?