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Since You Asked: Snooze buttons have been nine minutes since 1950s Sunday Oct 16, 2016 at 12:01 AM I hit the snooze button, and I get nine more minutes of sleep. Why nine? Couldn't it have been 11 minutes, or (gulp) only seven? What's so special about nine minutes? — Steve Zzzz.   No pun intended, but for quite some time the internet has been abuzz about your very question, Steve. Whether one wakes up with an iPhone, a clock radio or something even more old-fashioned, nine minutes seems to be the magic wake-up window. The duration has its roots in the late 1950s with the General Electric Telechron model 7H241 plug-in alarm clock, which introduced the "Snooz-Alarm," allowing sleepyheads a few extra minutes, according to telechron.net, which tracks the rise and fall of GE Telechron plug-in clocks made in Ashland, Massachusetts, between 1912 and 1979. That 1950s model offered a "snooz" of about 10 minutes, but in practice nine minutes and whatever number of seconds made the difference. Competitor Westclox gave a choice in the shuteye window with the Drowse line of electric alarm clocks, introduced in 1959. The clock had buttons for 5 and 10-minute snoozes. In time, the two buttons were turned into a single 7-minute snooze, according to clockhistory.com, but two-snooze models with the feature were sold only until about 1980. Solidifying the nine-minute snooze may have been those early digital alarm clocks that physically flipped cards every minute, such as the one you may have noticed in "Back to the Future." According to a thoughtful answer on the Q&A site Quora, on those clocks the snooze marked the card farthest away on the minute column, building an expectation that seems to have carried over as the clocks went digital and into the smartphone era. — Send questions to “Since You Asked,” Mail Tribune Newsroom, P.O. Box 1108, Medford, OR 97501; by fax to 541-776-4376; or by email to [email protected]. To see a collection of columns, go to mailtribune.com/youasked. We’re sorry, but the volume of questions received prevents us from answering all of them.