SPRINGFIELD HEIGHTS — Dale Pruitt, 43, who at approximately 9 p.m. Tuesday told his wife he was going to “just look at one Wikipedia article real quick,” has reached the entry on the regulations governing 14th-century Venetian shipbuilding, according to family members and a browser history that now runs longer than the lease on the house.

The journey reportedly began with a question about how deep the Mariana Trench goes. Pruitt then clicked through to deep-sea pressure, the bathyscaphe Trieste, the Swiss inventor Auguste Piccard, hot-air ballooning, the Montgolfier brothers, paper manufacturing, and the medieval Italian guilds that, in Pruitt’s words at 1:40 a.m., “basically invented the assembly line.”

“I asked him if he was coming to bed, and he said, ‘In a second, they’re standardizing the oars,’” said his wife, Renee Pruitt. “I don’t know who ‘they’ are. I don’t know what year it is for him.”

Witnesses report that Pruitt has been in the same chair for six hours and fourteen minutes, and that he occasionally reads passages aloud to the dog. At approximately 2:50 a.m., he was overheard saying, “The Arsenal could build a galley a day,” followed by a long silence and then, “A day.”

Dr. Halvard Ostrowicz-Bell, a senior fellow in Recreational Hyperlink Dynamics at the Northern Midwest Institute for Tangents, said Pruitt’s case is textbook.

“The subject begins with a narrow, defensible curiosity and then follows the blue text wherever it leads,” said Ostrowicz-Bell, who has studied the phenomenon for nineteen years and has not yet finished a single one of his own footnotes. “Around the second hour, the subject stops asking questions and begins simply collecting facts about dead guilds. By the fourth, he is no longer reading for any reason he could explain to a spouse.”

“He said it was just one article. I have now seen him open forty-one of them, and that is only the ones I could see from the hallway.”

At press time, Pruitt had opened a tab on the Venetian Senate’s oversight of timber supply, which family members described as “a bad sign.” He had also begun referring to the Adriatic as “our waters.”

Efforts to reach Pruitt for comment were unsuccessful. When his wife held a glass of water in front of the screen, he reportedly took it without looking up and said, “Did you know they stored the oak for years?”

Renee Pruitt said she has made peace with the situation and is prepared to wait it out. “Last time it was the Hanseatic League, and he was back by Thursday,” she said. “He did come back with opinions about herring, though.”

Pruitt has a 7:30 a.m. meeting. Asked whether he planned to attend, he reportedly replied, “One more link,” and then clicked on “Cog (ship).”