The Travels of an Eyelid

1901

The many thousands of miles which a man unconsciously travels in his lifetime, taking into consideration the paces his footsteps measure as he walks about each day, are enough to make him sit down to rest for the remainder of his life.

But now a German scientist has come forward with some still more startling facts concerning the journeys which our eyelid undertakes every time it winks, and it is not possible for us to see, he says, unless we wink. Unconsciously we wink once a second, so that for the time we are awake during the day we voluntarily wink from 48,000 to 50,000 times and in a year have moved our eyelids down and up again no less than 18,250,000 times. The distance that the eyelid travels in its great speed is measured from a single involuntary wink.

This, the scientist says, is a quarter of an inch both ways, the eyelid moving equally up and down, so that, taking the movement of both eyelids into consideration, they cover some 50,000 inches in a day. The eyelids of a man who has lived for 50 years will have unconsciously traveled a third of the way around the earth, or about 7,200 miles, a calculation sufficient in itself to cause the victim of insomnia to fall into a dreamless sleep as he reads it. — London Mail.