How Sleep Became the Enemy of Productivity

Wake Up, It’s Nighttime

Thomas Edison and the Cult of Sleep Deprivation

The Atlantic

Sleep no more! Thomas Edison doth murder sleep. The inventor claimed he slept just four hours a night and apparently forced the same standard on his employees, who responded by falling asleep a lot. “At first the boys had some difficulty in keeping awake, and would go to sleep under stairways and in corners,” Edison said. “We employed watchers to bring them out, and in time they got used to it.” The no-sleep thing became part of the Edison mystique, Olga Khazan writes in The Atlantic, with biographies describing his 4 a.m. interviews of job candidates and his catnaps on lab benches between marathon work sessions. Sleep deprivation was seen as manly. Psychologists began promoting the idea that people didn’t really need much sleep after all. But I guess it’s logical that the inventor of the incandescent light bulb would consider sleep to be his ultimate competition. -Andy O’Connell