Technology shapes the world, but it also shapes the user.

Many of us have heard the famous stories about Edison and his invention of the light bulb, but you might not know of British inventor Joseph Swan, who patented the design that Edison improved on several years before Edison's 1879 patent. In the U.S. William Sawyer and Albon Man had a patent on the technology before Edison. In both cases Edison's companies ended up merging with the companies using these patents.

Interestingly, none of them was working in a vacuum, scientists around the world had been experimenting with incandescent lamps for 40 years before that. Edison's contributions came as a series of improvements on the original ideas that led to incredible improvements in the technology, besides finding the filament material that took bulbs from just a few hours to over 1200, he created the Edison screw our now standard fitting for light bulbs.

Edison and scientists of the time could likely never have predicted or imagined how electric light is used or effects us today. In 2024 Gallup shared how American's sleep has declined over the years, dropping from 59% reporting 8+ hours of sleep in 1942, to just 26% in 2023. Well lit streets enable for easier, safer travel after dark. Factories with electric lighting enable longer working hours. Lights in every room of the house enable us to read or work late into the night. The electric light is hardly the single factor contributing to this change, but like its incremental adoption, we can see the incremental effects that technology is having on us.

I found especially fascinating the research of Dr. Roger Ekirich, who spent more than a decade researching a lost societal memory. Somewhere around the 1920s it faded from our collective consciousness that all over the world, before artificial light was common and powerful, humans actually slept in two shifts at night. People would sleep from around 9pm until midnight, then wake for an hour or two and then sleep again until dawn.

The technology of the light bulb didn't just shape the world around it, pushing away the darkness, it shaped the users too. Reshaping how we sleep, how we work, and even our biology[1].

Our Creator begins by creating light and the day/night cycle and later uses darkness (so intense no one even moved) as a plague against the Egyptians to demonstrate his power over their sun god, Ra. But in Revelation 21:23-25, John writes

The city has no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God illuminates the city, and the Lamb is its light. The nations will walk in its light, and the kings of the world will enter the city in all its glory. Its gates will never be closed at the end of day because there is no night there.

The Creator, who created light, who demonstrated His dominion over it, tells us how He ends this arc: in a city with no darkness, illuminated by His glory; not a poor technology that shapes us while we sleep.

Psalm 127:2
It is useless for you to work so hard from early morning until late at night, anxiously working for food to eat; for God gives rest to his loved ones.
  1. West et al. (2011) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21164152 - Blue LED light (peak 469nm) suppresses melatonin. Rahman, St Hilaire & Lockley (2017) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5536841 - Ordinary bedroom-intensity light (50–100 lux) suppresses melatonin↩︎