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    Regardless, in 1790, we get the U.S. Patent Act, allowing each object in creation a number and a name, its purpose tendered, tallied, and on file for commoditization.
    In the nineteenth century, we get local anesthesia. We get the revolver, kaleidoscopes, gas stoves and bikes, the tuning fork. Photography teaches us to pose in ways we want to remember, captured just that way, replicating among a light. Landscapes and houses appear doubled in our images behind us. Some see the pin-sized hole of the camera’s eye as a magic conduit of Satan, though this most of us will learn to disregard. Machines are replicating also, customizing to our more and more particular kinds of needs.
    Water beds are invented to help prevent bedsores in invalids. The stethoscope allows us to listen in on what’s been going on inside us all this time: sounds we mostly haven’t located in our bodies before, except sometimes at night, when with our heads pressed into the beds we hear the reflection of our heartbeat, the breath around our heads.
    In the new light, of sick people, we become aware of the spreading of unseen cells. These cells are given names. They’ve been here all this time surrounding, begetting our disease. People die now for reasons we can more aptly put a face to. We use their death to inform the growing duration of our lives. We learn surgical operation, opening flesh. We get the telephone, the typewriter, ice cream, and badminton, and these too are not enough, and we make more.
    In 1795, 114 Johann Blumenbach becomes the first person to actually observe the brain of someone who is asleep. He finds that in this state the brain is paler than at other times, thus suggesting, to him, that sleep is caused indeed by blood flushing to the skull. Various vascular theories, including those by Alcmaeon, von Haller, and Boerhaave, all revolve again around Hippocrates’s idea of sleep as related to the flow of blood. Luigi Rolando cuts the cerebral hemispheres from birds and finds the creatures then become perpetually sleepy. Further research is performed on subjects with fractured skulls: “When she was in deep sleep the organ remained motionless beneath the crest of the cranial bones. When she was dreaming it became somewhat elevated and when she was awake it protruded from the fissure in the skull.” 115
    Thirty years later, Robert MacNish says it’s more about the blood’s brain pressure than about the flow. Another dozen years and Johannes Purkinje says that in sleep the brain’s corona radiata become pressed upon by blood-cell congestion in the basal ganglia to the point neural expressions are cut off, thus suggesting sleep is more like a mode of cerebral blockage than an emptiness, mere drain. In 1865, John Jackson finds that the flesh of the eyes also go gray in sleeping, and therefore suggests sleep is not a result of the brain’s loss or gain of mass of skullheld blood at all. A guy named Hammond comes back and says sleep is more like an anemia, the decrease of hemoglobin. Theories by Fleming, Donders, Durham, Howell, and Hill continue to support the concept of sleep as the product of the blood’s evacuation, though they disagree on where this blood goes when it leaves the brain. More and more people publish papers containing their own tailored projection, flailing new thought into the light. In the meantime, we get celluloid, allowing cheaper, quicker, better replications: the replications are replicating.
    In the second half of the nineteenth century, via Camillo Golgi and his successor Heinrich Waldeyer, neurons are identified and named. Rabl-Rückhardt suggests that sleep may be caused by a state in which these neurons become paralyzed and therefore temporarily cease communication. Lepine and Duval say this too. Santiago Ramón y Cajal says not only is this perhaps the cause of sleep but it could also explain hypnotics. Ernesto Lugaro takes the opposite face of the same coin, and says it’s not paralysis, but an