It turns out that when you prolong your slumber by pressing the snooze button, you don’t get to sleep for ten more minutes. It’s actually just for nine minutes. iPhone’s automatic settings are set to only snooze for nine minutes. Isn’t it weird? Why nine minutes when you can just snooze it for exactly ten minutes? There’s a long history behind that, as Reader’s Digest details:
Alarm clocks were introduced to snooze buttons in 1956 with General Electric-Telechron’s Snooz-Alarm, according to Pacific Standard. That model’s snooze lasted nine minutes, but there are a few theories as to why. Speaking of your iPhone, learn these hidden iPhone hacks you never knew about.
Alarm clocks did exist before the snooze function, so there was already a standard gear setup that innovators had to work with. Getting the gear teeth to line up to allow for exactly ten minutes wasn’t possible, so they had to choose between nine minutes and a few seconds or a little bit over ten minutes.
Here’s where the theories start to differ. Some people say reports in the 1950s suggested ten minutes was enough for drowsy people to fall back into deep sleep. That would mean they’d wake up cranky again, so nine minutes was the sweet spot between more time in bed without letting it get out of hand. Getting right up is just one of the morning habits of successful people, by the way.
But the most common theory seems to come down to simplicity. A double-digit snooze would be harder to program than a single-digit one, so designers figured the less complicated design was the way to go.
Later clocks didn’t necessarily follow Snooz-Alarm’s lead (Westclox’s Drowse clock let snoozers choose between five and ten minutes), but other clocks—including iPhone’s alarm app—decided to pay homage to the original nine minutes.
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