Watching the Road Runner cartoons on a Saturday morning in the 1960s was a special kind of childhood pleasure, when settling down in front of the television meant entering a wonderfully simple world where the Road Runner could outsmart Wile E. Coyote time after time without saying much more than a cheerful “beep-beep.” There was something irresistible about watching the elaborate traps, rockets, spring-loaded gadgets, painted tunnels, and impossible schemes unfold, especially because you always knew Wile E. was about to suffer another spectacularly funny disaster. The violence was cartoonish and harmless, the stories were easy to follow, and the combination of fast action, silence, and exaggerated sound effects made every chase feel like a little Saturday-morning event.
Long ago, the idea of a weekend would have seemed almost as strange as the idea of sleeping late just because you could. For much of history, people worked according to the seasons, daylight, religious customs, and the demands of daily survival, rather than a neat Monday-through-Friday schedule. As factories and industrial cities grew in the 1800s, however, workers increasingly found themselves spending long hours on the job, and the seven-day workweek became a source of growing frustration. In the United States and Britain, workers, religious groups, and reformers began pushing for shorter hours and regular days of rest. Sunday had traditionally been a day of worship and rest for many Christians, while Saturday was an important day of rest in Jewish communities, and gradually the idea of giving workers both days off began to take hold. One amusing turning point came when some American employers discovered that a two-day break could actually be good for business because rested workers were happier and more productive, while their extra free time gave them more opportunities to shop and enjoy themselves. By the early 20th century, the two-day weekend was becoming increasingly common, and in 1926 Henry Ford famously adopted a five-day, 40-hour workweek for many of his workers, helping popularize the arrangement. Eventually, Saturday and Sunday became the great little island of freedom at the end of the workweek, when people could sleep in, visit friends, go fishing, watch cartoons, work around the house, or simply do absolutely nothing without feeling guilty about it. And that may be the greatest achievement of the modern weekend: humanity somehow managed to turn two ordinary days on the calendar into something we spend five days eagerly waiting for.