The man upstairs walks around in boots till two in the morning and I can't sleep

I know his whole schedule and I have never seen his face. — Downstairs tenant, 1996

By 1915 Franz Kafka was having wax earplugs sent from Berlin to get through the noise in his Prague home. He called them a little greasy and said they didn't keep the noise out, only took the edge off. Years later he wrote that he couldn't manage day or night without them. That's still the review. A plug sits in your ear canal and seals it, so the world comes through muffled, not gone. Nothing on the shelf makes the man upstairs take off his boots.

For now: roll a foam earplug thin, pull the top of your ear up and back, slide it in, and hold it there until it swells.

The full file

Rome had it worse. Carts were allowed into the city only after dark, and the poet Juvenal, around the year 100, complained that the wagons and the shouting would wake a dozing seal, or an emperor. Sleep, he said, costs millions in Rome.

Earplugs took a long time to get decent. In 1885 a retired army captain named Maximilian Pleßner sold the Antiphon, a small ball of metal or hard rubber on a bracket that sealed the ear. Users found it uncomfortable and likely to fall out at night. In 1907 a Berlin pharmacist, Maximilian Negwer, tried beeswax first. It went rancid and brittle and irritated the skin. He switched to cotton soaked in Vaseline and paraffin wax, and from 1908 he sold them six pairs for one mark.

When the first war broke out in 1914, one of Kafka's first worries was whether the mail from Berlin would still bring his plugs.

Eighteen centuries from the carts to the first decent plug. Nobody has fixed the neighbors.