When you take a look at American history, we might seem a nap-friendly people. After all, some of our most productive figures napped shamelessly during the day, among them Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. But they probably did so because they couldn’t help it.

Consider the daily schedule Franklin drew up for The Art of Virtue, a treatise he worked on for 50 years but never finished: Over a 24-hour period, sleep gets allotted a mere five hours. Or take the contemptuous words of Edison: “Sleep is an acquired habit. Cells don’t sleep. Fish swim in the water all night. Even a horse doesn’t sleep. A man doesn’t need any sleep.”

For these Type A personalities, napping may have been a badge of honor, proof that they disdained sleep as a nuisance to be beggared and cheated. (By the way, Edison may have known a lot about filaments and wires, but he was dead wrong about fish and horses.)

Napping was more valued on the other side of the Atlantic, where the habit’s foremost champion was probably Winston Churchill.

In The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his World War II memoirs, the British statesman wrote, “Nature had not intended mankind to work from 8 in the morning until midnight without the refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts 20 minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces.”

In southern Europe, naps were woven into the fabric of life. But Spain, where the siesta is deeply ingrained, has been adjusting to changed circumstances — in 2005, the Spanish government cancelled the siesta for its employees.

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