Michael: Alright, Kevin, I have a controversial statement for you: your 8-hour sleep schedule is a modern invention, and possibly, a mistake. Our ancestors would think we’re doing it all wrong. Kevin: Hold on, my sacred eight hours? The one thing I try to protect? You're telling me it's a historical blunder? That feels like a personal attack, Michael. What are you getting at? Michael: I'm getting at the core idea of this incredible book we're diving into today: The Alchemy of Us by Ainissa Ramirez. She argues that the materials we invent don't just sit there. They actively reshape us, right down to our biology. Kevin: The Alchemy of Us. I like that title. It sounds like it’s about more than just gears and wires. Michael: Exactly. And Ramirez is the perfect person to write this. She's a materials scientist from Stanford and a former Yale professor who became a 'science evangelist' because she felt the wonder was missing from how we talk about science. She literally has patents to her name, so she's not just talking about invention, she's lived it. The book was widely acclaimed for this very reason—it puts the human story back into technology. Kevin: Okay, a scientist with patents who’s also a storyteller. I'm in. So, connect this back to my sleep. Why is my eight-hour block a modern mistake?

Michael: Because before the 18th century, and before precise, affordable clocks became common, most people didn't sleep that way. Historians like A. Roger Ekirch, whom Ramirez cites, have found tons of evidence that people practiced what's called "segmented sleep." Kevin: Segmented sleep? What, like in shifts? Michael: Pretty much. You’d go to bed, sleep for about four hours—that was your "first sleep." Then you'd wake up for an hour or two around midnight. This wasn't a sign of insomnia; it was a normal, quiet time. People would reflect, pray, have sex, or even visit neighbors. Then they'd go back for their "second sleep" of another few hours. Kevin: Wow. So that 3 a.m. moment when I wake up and my brain starts racing, and I panic that I’ll be a zombie the next day... that's just my body trying to party like it's 1699? Michael: Ramirez argues it's a "remnant of a very strong echo of this older pattern." Our bodies might still have that programming. But the Industrial Revolution, powered by new materials, changed everything. And the key invention was the clock. To illustrate how obsessed we became with precise time, Ramirez tells the story of Ruth Belville, the "Greenwich Time Lady." Kevin: A Time Lady? That sounds like a Doctor Who character. What did she do? Michael: In early 20th-century London, she sold time. Literally. Once a week, she'd go to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, set her family's hyper-accurate pocket watch—nicknamed "Arnold"—to the master clock, and then make her rounds to about 200 clients. Banks, watchmakers, businesses... they'd pay her to look at Arnold and set their own clocks. Kevin: That is the most wonderfully bizarre business I've ever heard of. She was a walking, talking time-syncing service. Michael: Exactly. And her business thrived because punctuality was becoming a new virtue. Factories needed workers to show up at the same time. Trains had to run on schedules to avoid crashing. Benjamin Franklin's adage, "time is money," became the mantra. This new world couldn't tolerate a flexible, two-part sleep schedule. It demanded a single, consolidated, efficient block of unconsciousness. Kevin: So the clock didn't just tell time, it imposed a new way of living. It forced our bodies to conform to the machine, not the other way around. Michael: That's the alchemy. We invented a material object—a clock made of better steel springs and vibrating quartz crystals—to measure the day. In turn, that object reached into our bedrooms and rewired our most basic biological rhythm. We shaped the clock, and the clock shaped us. Kevin: That’s a little terrifying. It makes you wonder what our modern gadgets are doing to us without us even realizing it.

Michael: And just as clocks synchronized us in time, another material was about to synchronize us in space: steel. Specifically, steel rails. Ramirez points out that the Bessemer process, which made steel cheap and abundant, was a game-changer. By 1900, there were enough steel rails in the U.S. to circle the globe ten times. Kevin: That’s an insane amount of steel. And I assume that means railroads, connecting every corner of the country. Michael: Right. And this connection had a profound, almost spiritual power. Ramirez tells the story of Abraham Lincoln's funeral train in 1865. After he was assassinated, his body was put on a train for a 1,600-mile journey from Washington D.C. to Springfield, Illinois. Kevin: A national funeral procession by rail. Michael: For thirteen days, the train, called "The Lincoln Special," moved slowly across the country. In big cities, millions filed past his coffin. But the most moving part was what happened in the small towns and rural areas. People gathered by the tracks all day and all night, lighting bonfires, singing hymns, and just... waiting. To be present. For a moment, those steel rails stitched a fractured, grieving nation together in a single, shared experience. Kevin: Wow. That's a powerful image. The railroad as a thread of national unity. It’s a beautiful side of technology. Michael: It is. But connection is a double-edged sword. Let's jump to another invention that connected the nation: the telegraph. In 1881, President James A. Garfield was shot. For 80 days, he lingered between life and death, and the entire country was hooked on the telegraph bulletins coming from his bedside. It was another moment of shared national experience, a national vigil. Kevin: Okay, so another story of technology bringing people together. Where's the dark side? Michael: The dark side is in the medium itself. The telegraph was expensive. You paid by the word. So, news dispatches had to be incredibly concise. Journalists developed a style that was all facts, no fluff. Short sentences. Short paragraphs. Vigorous, active language. Ramirez points to the style guide of the Kansas City Star newspaper, which famously instructed its reporters to "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs." Kevin: Wait a minute. A young Ernest Hemingway was a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star. Michael: You got it. Hemingway himself said his time at the Star gave him the "best rules" for writing he ever learned. That famously sparse, direct, "iceberg" style that revolutionized American literature? Ramirez argues its DNA can be traced back to the economic constraints of sending messages over a copper wire. Kevin: That is a wild connection. So you're saying a technology, a bunch of copper wires and clacking machines, literally changed the sound of the American novel? Michael: It shaped the language. It rewarded brevity and stripped away ornamentation. We invented the telegraph to share information, and in turn, it taught us a new way to talk, a new way to write, and maybe even a new way to think. We connected the country, but we also compressed our language. Kevin: The alchemy again. We make the tool, the tool remakes us. That’s a much more complicated view of "progress."

Kevin: Okay, so materials can change our bodies, our language... but can they be biased? Can a material be racist? That sounds like a stretch. Michael: It's not a stretch at all, and this is one of the most powerful and, frankly, disturbing parts of the book. Ramirez dives into the history of photographic film. She asks a simple question: why was it so hard for so long to take a good photograph of a Black person? Kevin: I’ve heard about this. The lighting was always off, details were lost... Michael: Right. And it wasn't just about lighting. It was about the chemistry of the film itself. For decades, photo labs calibrated their color processing using a standard reference card. It was called a "Shirley card," named after the first model, a Kodak employee named Shirley Page. And Shirley was a white woman. Kevin: Oh no. So the baseline for "normal" skin tone was... white skin. Michael: Precisely. The film's chemical emulsion, the very material designed to capture reality, was optimized for Caucasian skin tones. It was literally engineered with a racial bias. Darker skin tones were often rendered as muddy, lacking detail, or just plain wrong. It wasn't until furniture companies and chocolate manufacturers complained that the film couldn't capture the rich details of dark wood and dark chocolate that Kodak started to seriously address the issue. Kevin: Wait, so it took complaints about chocolate and tables to get them to fix a problem that was misrepresenting millions of people? That’s infuriating. Michael: It's a stark example of how economic incentives can drive change when moral arguments fail. But the story gets even more intense. Ramirez tells the story of Caroline Hunter and Ken Williams, two Black employees at Polaroid in 1970. Kevin: Polaroid, the instant camera company. Michael: The very same. One day, they discovered that Polaroid was selling its ID-2 instant photo system to the government of South Africa. And what was it being used for? To produce the photos for the infamous "passbooks" of the apartheid regime. These were the documents Black South Africans were forced to carry, which controlled their movement and enforced segregation. Kevin: My god. So the fun, instant camera technology was being used as a tool of racial oppression. Michael: Hunter and Williams were horrified. They formed the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement and launched a campaign. Their slogan was devastatingly effective: "Polaroid imprisons black people in 60 seconds." They demanded Polaroid withdraw from South Africa. Kevin: That takes incredible courage, to challenge your own employer like that. Michael: It does. And it shows that technology is never neutral. A camera, a piece of film—these things seem inert. But in the wrong hands, or designed with the wrong assumptions, they become instruments of power and control. The material itself becomes part of a system of injustice. Kevin: So the bias isn't just accidental, like with the Shirley card. It can be actively weaponized. This completely changes how I think about the tools we use every day.

Michael: And that's the "alchemy" that Ainissa Ramirez writes about so brilliantly. We think we're just making tools to solve problems—how to tell time, how to cross a country, how to take a picture. But these materials—clock springs, steel rails, chemical film—are simultaneously remaking us. They're not neutral. They get inside our heads and our habits, shaping our sleep, our language, and even our social justice movements. Kevin: It’s a profound and unsettling idea. We see ourselves as the masters of technology, the inventors. But her book shows it’s a two-way street. We are also the invention. The material is working on us, too. Michael: Exactly. She wants us to see that the world we've built is a reflection of who we are, flaws and all. The bias in the film reflects the bias in the society that made it. The relentless pace of the clock reflects the economic system that demanded it. Kevin: It makes you look at your smartphone differently, doesn't it? It’s not just a piece of glass and silicon. It’s a product of all this history. What unseen biases are baked into the technology you're holding right now? And more importantly, how is it shaping you? Michael: That's the question she leaves us with. And it’s a vital one. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. What's a piece of tech that you feel has changed you, for better or for worse? Let us know. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.