And at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, in 1893, the wonder of electricity brightened literally miles of consumer goods in a vast department store created especially for the fair. Theaters, restaurants, and even amusement parks were fully illuminated, inside and out, within a few years of the invention of the electric light bulb. And electricity ushered in modern forms of advertising, which provided all sorts of inducements for going out. For one thing, electric lighting of the streets greatly increased the level of safety people could expect when they went out at night. But, by comparison, the effect on our sleeping habits of electric lighting outside was much greater still. The introduction of electric light in the home was another important factor in distancing us from the natural cycle of day and night. By the turn of the century, you could stay up all night reading the standardized times of the train schedules. But with electricity there was almost nothing to it. (Rather than deal with them, the nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson preferred to compose many of her works in total darkness.) Also, compared with just flipping a switch, there was a certain amount of effort, sometimes even danger, involved in using gas or oil.

For instance, reading for long periods was difficult by gas or oil, and they were dirty compared with electricity. The gas lighting that illuminated urban homes before that year, and the oil lamps that burned in rural areas, were effective to a certain degree, but they had disadvantages that made it easy for people to turn them off and go to bed. After Edison's development of the light bulb in 1879, darkness as it used to be known ceased to exist. From the would-be sleeper's point of view, there's very little to be said in favor of the electric light bulb. Yet in terms of reorienting us away from the natural rhythms of nature toward a man-made, machine-controlled, deterministic experience of external reality, the introduction of Standard Time is hugely significant. Later in this chapter you'll learn how even the alarm clock, that anxiety-producing enter sleep. I want to live in the same world as everyone else.

No, and it's a little late for that anyway, by any reckoning. Am I opposed to a system of standardized time? People - 55 million people - now eat, sleep, and work, as well as travel, by railroad time." Certain states even refused to follow the new standard, but the Indianapolis Daily Sentinel expressed what eventually became the hard reality of the situation: "The sun is no longer to boss the job. Yet it was only after ten years of meetings among railroad executives and assorted meteorologists that, on November 18, 1883, Standard Time went into effect with the dropping of a huge ball from the top of a building in New York City - a tradition that still continues on New Year's Eve. Throughout history, people had stayed home at night and, among other things, slept.