At
2am tomorrow morning, the time change will place as America is set to
spring ahead an hour as Standard Time is to be replaced with Daylight
Savings Time, which will run through the first week of November. For
most people, this will mean setting the clock ahead an hour before
bed tonight. While most lovers of the great outdoors will rejoice,
astronomers will not as, thanks to the time shift, dark skies will
arrive an hour later than “normal.”
So,
the controversy known, how did DST come about?
To
trace the origins of DST, one must travel back to France of the
1700s. At that time Benjamin Franklin was serving as an envoy to the
French government. Now, France is at a higher latitude than most of
the United States, which means that the length variances of day and
night are more extreme thanks to the higher latitude. In France,
Franklin was somewhat disturbed by what he considered people living
out of sync with nature and paying for it, literally, in candles.
When most people got up, the Sun had already been up for several
hours thanks to France's higher latitude. However, instead of people
adjusting their schedules to the natural sunlight, they merely got up
at the same time they always did and, as a result, stayed up well
into the night, burning untold numbers of candles.
Franklin's
solution? People should get up earlier (and thus go to bed earlier)
during the summer and make use of the natural sunlight so as to
economize on candle usage. In fact, Franklin published this idea,
anonymously, in a 1784, rather tongue in cheek essay to the Journal of Paris newspaper. In truth, Benjamin Franklin is not the father of DST, but he
was the first recorded person in history to suggest that people live
more in-tune with the Sun.
After
Franklin, the world would have to wait more than a century in order
to get more advocates for living in sync with the Sun.
See also: Daylight Savings Time trivia
See also: Daylight Savings Time trivia
Around
the year 1900, two different men would bring the idea of an actual
time change (rather than the wake up/go to bed time change proposed
by Franklin) to the public forefront. In England, prominent
builder/outdoorsman William
Willet,
like Franklin, hated the idea that people were sleeping half their
mornings away and, on a personal note, hated having to cut his rounds
of golf short due to early nightfall. It is Willet who is commonly
credited with the DST idea despite the fact that New Zealand
entomologist George Vernon Hudson also proposed a time shift, 10
years previously. Hudson's personal stake: extra daylight would allow
more time for specimen collection.
In
the years following the time shift proposals by Willet and Hudson,
the thought of springing the clocks forward started to spread around
the world but, aside from local decisions to shift the clock (the city of Thunder Bay in Canada was first to do so in 1908) like with most political matters, more important
issues came to the forefront, at least until 1916.
By
the arrival of 1916, Europe had been at war for 2 years. As the
then-called Great War continued with no end in sight, governments
were looking for ways to cut costs for the war effort in any way they
could. Then, come summer 1916, the Central Powers (Germany,
Austria-Hungary, and their allies) agreed to set the clocks ahead for
an hour as a means for saving coal. The other belligerents quickly
followed suit. The United States, which entered the war in 1917,
adopted a time shift in 1918.
Come
the end of the war, though, DST was largely discontinued. However,
with the advent of WWII, it would be re-instituted as, once again, an
energy-saving measure. This time, though, it stuck around, although
its advent wasn't formalized, at least in the United Sates, until
1966. Curiously, though, the Uniform
Time Act
was not binding in that localities could choose to ignore it and keep
Standard Time if they so wished. So far, Arizona and Hawaii still
don't observe DST. In 2007, at least in the United States, DST was
extended on both ends.
Another
curious fact about DST is this: throughout history and around the
world, the shift has not always been one hour. In the past, time
changes ranging between 20 minutes and 2 hours have been observed.
Right now, there is debate in some countries whether to make DST the
new Standard Time, as in having DST all year, while other nations are
contemplating doing away with DST altogether. Also, there are pushes
in some places to extend DST by springing ahead more than 1 hour,
too.
In
all, the whole business of time change an an interesting history
lesson not found in most textbooks and is still history in the
making.
Oh yes, if you think our method of time change stinks, at least we don't track time like the ancients did. Most ancient cultures always kept 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night year-round because they adjusted the hours' lengths accordingly. And you thought springing ahead and falling back was an inconvenience!
Oh yes, if you think our method of time change stinks, at least we don't track time like the ancients did. Most ancient cultures always kept 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night year-round because they adjusted the hours' lengths accordingly. And you thought springing ahead and falling back was an inconvenience!
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