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The founder of Daylight Savings Time was William Willet. It was he who first seriously prososed the idea in 1907.
Standard Time begins each year at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of November.
(November 2 in 2008)
Daylight Saving Time begins each year at 2 a.m. on the second Sunday of March.
Move clocks ahead one hour at the start of Daylight Saving Time.
Daylight Saving time and Time zones are regulated by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Daylight Saving Time begins on March 9 and ends on Nov.2.
In Canada the usual reminder to set your clock
has changed. It's a few weeks later than the traditional start of Standard
Time. The change aligns Canada with the United States, which began
in 2007 to switch to Daylight Saving on the second Sunday in March
instead of early April, clamining to save energy. That has not happened
the California Energy Commission, report little or no energy savings,
no surprise there really. The lights are on the computers up, the malls
are open and there is more time to shop. We are dizzy with the ditzy
George Bush clock change, but then who knows maybe that was the point.
Retail and sporting goods note an uptick in sales when DST goes into
effect - people shop more
A Way back when before the dawn of the Electric era, a man with a big
idea planted a seed that would grow into a tangled snarling vine of confusing
ideas about time.
William Willett
About twelve months after Willett began to advocate daylight saving (he spent a fortune lobbying), he attracted the attention of the authorities and a Mr. Pearce later Sir Robert Pearce introduced a Bill in the House of Commons to make it compulsory to adjust the clocks. The bill was drafted in 1909 and introduced in Parliament several times, but it met with ridicule and opposition, especially from farming interests. Generally lampooned at the time, Willett died on March 4, 1915.
A Brief History of Daylight Saving(s) Time.
We will now switch back to "standard" from Daylight Saving Time from , all summer when you are getting up at 7.30 it is really 6.30, you could have slept in , gone to the park, meditate, take some extra time with the dog or family in the morning,..or whatever.
At falls has arrival and there is no more light in the morning, we will get our hour back. Spring ahead fall back, same as jet lag twice a year. At least it is only an hour, a relatively short trip, but still a pain in the neck. What is Daylight Savings Time as it is commonly known, but officially it is Daylight Saving time (no S) knowing this will make you instantly popular in certain circles I am sure. So why do we do this? Ask a handful of people you will likely get a slightly different answer from each one.
“The farmers want it because it allows them to get out earlier in the summer....”
“So farm kids don’t come home in the dark. In the winter.. i think.”
“for time in the summer afternoon.”
“its an occasion, and if we kept setting our clock ahead every spring without the fall back it just wouldn’t make any sense.”
Time for the most part measures the earth’s spin in the miraculous light of a star called The Sun. A luminous body so big and so far away that numbers seem meaningless, but what is important for us is that this defines our day.
When clocks came along and we able to break the day up into smaller and smaller bits, enabling unrelated groups of humans to arrive in one place at the same moment in time. This paved the way for the industrial revolution, church attendance, and modern warfare.
Up until Canada’s very own Sir Sandford Fleming (1883) we had clocks but they were only meaningful in a local way as in church is on Sunday at noon, every town or city set their clocks to the sun. Noon was when the sun was overhead as in “high noon”. Noon occurs at different times at different places as you travel, so train travelers of the day were having to set their watches as they moved from station to station. Mr. Fleming's brilliant idea that there should be a standard time, based on one hour increments starting from Greenwich England, the then known center of the Universe. So everyone within a longitudinal (vertical) stripe on the globe would have their clocks set to the same time, with 24 of these vertical time zones around the earth the problem was solved... more or less. So now Clock noon would occur anywhere from 90 minutes of actual noon, for most people it would be within the half hour of actual solar noon for that particular place. We now had a reasonable time system and we wouldn’t have to continually be fidgeting with our clocks. Unfortunately we couldn’t leave well enough alone.
The advent of the clock enabled measurement of things like how the day is shorter in winter than summer in northern countries like England. At the equator the day stays the same throughout the seasons. In lands north of the tropics there is more light in summer and less in winter, that has not changed for millennia.
Benjamin Franklin, while a minister to France, first suggested the idea of moving the clocks to accommodate the longer day in summer, in a satirical essay intended to make poke fun at the French habit at the time of sleeping in, and also skewing the overly thrifty folk who measure life in pennies saved, such as he once was until enlightened by the French "joi de vivre”. From the style of writing it can be assumed that Franklin meant the essay as a bit of humour, not to be taken seriously, an excerpt reads.
“I looked at my watch, which goes very well, and found that it was but six o clock” Ben sarcastically went on to state “Your readers, who with me have never seen any sign of sunshine before noon, and seldom regard the astronomical part of the almanac, will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of his rising so early; and especially when I assure them, that he gives light as soon as he rises. I am convinced of this.”
Crafty Ben claimed that a noted philosopher assured him that he was most certainly mistaken, for it was well known that "there could be no light abroad at that hour." His windows had not let the light in, but being open, had let the darkness out.
The essay was published in the Journal de Paris in April 1784. More than a century later a penny pinching humourless Englishman named William Willett, suggested they idea of moving the clocks ahead in the summer of 1907, seriously. Old Silly Willy Willet noticed that folks were sleeping in on bright sunny mornings, then had the nerve to complain about the dear price of candles, and what with people working in those days a good 10 to 14 hours, more than a few pence could be saved on candle costs by rousing the lazy ruffians out of bed earlier in the morning. When asked why not just simply get up an hour earlier, Willy wittily replied “What?” and just stood blinking for a time in the bright sunlight, as if such a strange simple thought must be absurd, as it had not occurred to him.
Willett wanted to move the clock ahead by 80 minutes in four moves of 20 minutes each during the spring and summer months. In 1908, the well rested and alert British House of Commons soundly rejected such an obviously stupid idea. Willett's idea didn't die though, and it was reintroduced when the Government of England, under the pressure of an exhausting world war, recognized that the nation could save precious energy if they changed their clocks during this time. By an Act of Parliament in 1916 clocks were put one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) during the summer months. This was British Summer Time or BS Time.
In 1918, also to conserve resources for the war effort, the U.S. Congress followed England’s lead and placed the country on Daylight Saving Time for the remainder of WW I. It was observed for seven long and brutal months in 1918 and 1919. The law, however, provoked such a massive public outrage that it was later repealed. The voting population had a large rural contingent and they soundly reasoned that just because humans could be prodded into thinking time itself had changed by merely moving of hands of a clock and thus getting up an hour earlier in the summer, sheep were not as cooperative, nor were cows, chickens or any other familiar animal. What with the animals sheepishly obeying their own internal rhythms it was difficult to get fresh produce into town on time in the morning with the clocks set ahead. At this time in history refrigeration was still a novel idea and not widely avialable, so fresh daily produce delivered at the start of the day was the normal way of doing things. Furthermore there is no actual saving of time we just get up an hour earlier in the summer. History will show that the observant and wide awake people triumphed over bumbling bean counting bureaucrats in those heady days of 1919.
It wasn’t until the Second World War that once again Daylight Saving Time was suggested and implemented. The astute and personable Canadian author Robertson Davies wrote, in 1947, “As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the daylight saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.”
After the War Daylight Saving Time was again put to bed but some states in the US continued to observe it, people by this time had become used to idea of listening to the wise voices of authority and were more compliant and less questioning than the previous generation.
From 1945 to 1966, there was no US federal law about daylight saving time. By the early 1960s, observance of daylight saving time was inconsistent, with some states on DST, and no agreement when to change clocks. In 1961, when studies made by the committee for time uniformity studied the issue found that along a 35-mile stretch of highway between Moundsville, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio, every traveler passed through no less than seven time changes.
In other words the problem that the practical Canadian Mr. Fleming had addressed in 1883, the many time changes a train traveller would have to observe, was rendered useless by overly earnest US and British officials. However a fix for the problems caused by the fix of Standard Time was soon to be revealed. The advent of refrigeration trucks, and good old propaganda from the media, spurred the uniform time act of 1966 in the United States. Pressure in the Canadian Business sector to be on the same time as the US markets spurred Canada to officially adopt Day Light Saving Time.
Accidents increase on the fall change, depression and suicides go up, people who find it difficult to adjust their biological clocks to the mechanical variations induced by the time change go through disprupted sleep cycles. Parents of newborns lament the summer change and many psychiatrists notice an increase in business.
We have a natural rhythm and every morning, without an alarm, we will awaken like clockwork at the time appointed by the sun and our bodies, for most it is before 7:30 am standard time. But twice a year the clock by our bed plays games with the clock in our head.
Each spring, after daylight saving time artificially pushes time ahead by an hour, we examine the clock expecting it to tell us it's 7 a.m. It says 8.
In the fall, when the clocks are turned back, we think it's 7 a.m. but the clock tells us that it is actually 6 am.
We don’t adjust overnight, it can take weeks and even months to adapt our natural rhythms to ones imposed by the demands of clock driven society, then we have to do it all again in six months. Is it any wonder we become passive and do not want to be actively involved in the affairs of our own society? If we can be told to do something as silly as setting our clocks back and forth twice a year, we are primed to obey more absurd and darker orders. We want to believe that we like it like this, it is good, but few of us have experienced anything different or really know why we do it. Well this author grew up in a place where the clocks stay the same all year round (DST all year), and guess what, no one notices or complains that we have more daylight in the summer, and our clock agrees with what we perceive, “yep, the days are indeed longer in the summer” we didn’t need Daylight Saving Time to tell us that. Were we just country bumpkins or in fact fiercely independent, sane and sensible with one the highest rates of voter turnout and philanthropy in Canada. I guess we had more time for that sort of thing.
If we must fidget with our clocks why not just leave it at DST or split the difference between DST and Standard time, give and take, that sort of thing, and then leave the damn clock alone.
Daeran Gall is a freelance writer and general observer of reality from the windswept plains of Saskatchewn currently living in Toronto.