about burning the candle at both ends is evidence that as soon as people had the means to eat away at the night, they did. But time, or rather, the keeping track of it, was the more powerful enemy. Before mechanical clocks replaced sundials, the night was a mysterious realm which could not be subdivided into minutes and seconds. Clocks and personal time pieces went hand in hand with industrialization and quickly became the instruments which undid sleep as it has been practiced for millennium.

Clock-time introduced the concept of "wasting time" and what could be more wasteful than lying in the dark doing nothing with no explicable reason to do so? Tiredness and the need for sleep increasingly became a sign of moral lassitude. As the popularity ofstreet lighting grew, the night retreated.

Paris was the first to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lanterns in 1667, followed closely by Lille, Amsterdam and eventually London. By the time the candles were replaced with gas, people had lost most of their associations of with night with thieves, fierce animals and witches.

As bedtimes grew later and later, references to "two sleeps" began to fade and to be seen as a bad thing. Parents were even encouraged to purge their children of any night-waking tendencies. An article in an 1829 British medical journal instructs parents that, "If no disease or accident there intervene, they will need no further repose than that obtained in their first sleep, which custom will have caused to terminate by itself just at