What Did People Do All Night Before Electricity?

For almost all of human history, the night was dark, long and controlled: town gates shut at sunset, curfew bells rang and candles cost money. So what did people do for all those hours? Historians found something strange in old court records and diaries: people talked about a "first sleep" and a "second sleep". This video follows the evidence, from a 1789 rushlight recipe to a 1990s sleep lab to hunter-gatherer wrist monitors, and explains why scientists still argue about it. Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night? Tell me what you do with that hour. 0:00 2 a.m. 0:33 How dark it really was 2:02 Gates, curfews and the night watch 3:10 First sleep and second sleep 5:05 Testing it in a lab 6:30 The twist 8:12 What killed the second sleep 9:22 Back to 2 a.m. SOURCES ▸ Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles (2001, American Historical Review) https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/106.2.343 The article that introduced "first sleep" and "second sleep", built from court records, diaries and literature. ▸ At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (2005, W. W. Norton) https://wwnorton.com/books/At-Days-Cl... Ekirch's book-length history of the pre-industrial night: darkness, curfews, the night watch, and segmented sleep. ▸ The Modernization of Western Sleep: Or, Does Insomnia Have a History? (2015, Past & Present 226) https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtu040 Ekirch traces how segmented sleep faded during the 1800s as artificial light spread and attitudes changed. ▸ In short photoperiods, human sleep is biphasic (1992, Journal of Sleep Research) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10607... Thomas Wehr: volunteers given 14-hour nights developed two sleep bouts with a 1–3 hour waking gap. ▸ Conservation of photoperiod-responsive mechanisms in humans (1993, American Journal of Physiology) https://doi.org/10.1152/ajpregu.1993.... The full protocol behind Wehr's experiment: a week of 16-hour days, then four weeks of 14-hour nights. ▸ Natural Sleep and Its Seasonal Variations in Three Pre-industrial Societies (2015, Current Biology) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.09... 94 Hadza, San and Tsimane people wore wrist monitors: about 6.4 hours of sleep, rarely broken in the night. ▸ Segmented Sleep in Preindustrial Societies (2016, Sleep) https://doi.org/10.5665/sleep.5558 Ekirch's reply to the Current Biology study, arguing that two sleeps were common far beyond northern Europe. ▸ Segmented sleep in a nonelectric, small-scale agricultural society in Madagascar (2017, American Journal of Human Biology) https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.22979 Samson et al. found people in a village with no electricity often woke at night and stayed up for an hour or two. ▸ Have we lost sleep? A reconsideration of segmented sleep in early modern England (2023, Medical History) https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2023.14 Niall Boyce questions how common and how regular segmented sleep really was. ▸ Reflections on 'Have we lost sleep?' (2024, Medical History) https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2024.20 Ekirch's response to Boyce, defending segmented sleep with further historical and anthropological evidence. ▸ The Natural History of Selborne, Letter XXVI (1789, Gilbert White) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20934 White's first-hand account of making rushlights: about an hour of light per rush, 5½ hours for a farthing. ▸ The Statute of Winchester (1285, 13 Edw. I) https://statutes.org.uk/site/the-stat... The medieval law that shut town gates from sunset to sunrise and arrested strangers out at night until morning. ▸ Curfew, word origin (Online Etymology Dictionary) https://www.etymonline.com/word/curfew "Curfew" comes from Old French cuevrefeu, "cover fire", the evening bell for banking hearth fires. ▸ How gas lamps illuminated London (London Museum) https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/colle... Winsor's 1807 Pall Mall gas-light display, and around 50,000 London gas lamps by the 1820s. ▸ Joseph Wilson Swan (Linda Hall Library) https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/... Swan's incandescent lamp, demonstrated in Newcastle in 1879, the same year as Edison's. ▸ The Lunar Society (Sorbonne Université, 18th-Century Cities) https://18thc-cities.sorbonne-univers... The Birmingham circle of Watt, Wedgwood and others that met near the full moon so members had light to ride home by. ▸ People far from urban lights still skimp on sleep (2017, Duke Today) https://today.duke.edu/2017/02/people... A plain-English write-up of the Madagascar study's night-waking findings. This video is history, not medical advice. If poor sleep is affecting your health, talk to a doctor. Narration voice: ElevenLabs. Music and sound: generated for this video.