This thing that we do once a year is to advance our clocks forward one hour, skipping over the 2am hour and going directly from 1:59am to 3am. This initiates a period of time that has come to cover roughly two thirds of the year. This period is known as “Daylight Savings Time” and lasts until the first Sunday of November, which is the day on which the 2am hour, instead of being skipped over, is repeated twice.
It is a bit difficult to say for sure who came up with this idea of Daylight Savings Time – not due to any lack of documentation on this history, but due to the fact that the idea changed quite a bit from the time of its earliest identifiable precursor to the time that it was first implemented. The first of the three people who are most commonly credited (or, should I say, blamed) for the idea is Benjamin Franklin, who suggested waking up and going to sleep an hour early with his saying: “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”. However, that saying was more about suggesting a general way of life rather than a shift for part of the year. Furthermore, as Wikipedia points out, during Franklin’s time, standardization of time did not exist as it does today. Needless to say, Franklin’s suggestion did not by any means involve fiddling with any clock as later proposals did.
The next on the list of the accused is the entomologist, George Hudson. Hudson proposed moving the clock forward during the summer. However, had his proposal been enacted, things would have been even worse, as he proposed shifting the clock not by one hour, but by two.
The blame for coming up with the version of Daylight Savings Time that ended up actually getting implemented goes to a British builder named William Willett. A few local jurisdictions, starting with Port Arthur, Ontario, implemented his idea in his lifetime, but it wasn’t until the few years after his death that countries in the midst of the First World War started to adopt it on a national scale.
However, from the time that it was first proposed, Daylight Savings Time has had strong opponents. Agricultural workers tend to resent having fewer hours of daylight available to them in the morning when they need to start their outdoor work. At the time it was believed that daylight savings time would save energy by reducing the number of hours that people would need to keep the lights on in the evening – but these days it is very questionable whether it actually saves any energy at all, and it may even increase energy expenditure in the form of cooling costs.
And then there is the issue that was the biggest pet peeve of mine back when I worked a 9-to-5 job, that being that a sudden jump in when one has to wake up in the morning can cause all kinds of trauma to the human biological clock. This is not just a minor inconvenience, but can be a serious annual health crisis to many people.
This is causing many people to consider abolishing the practice of shifting the clocks twice a year, either by abolishing Daylight Savings Time altogether or by making it a year-round thing. The US State of Hawaii has never observed Daylight Savings Time, nor does most of Arizona (their exception being the Navajo tribal lands which do observe it). A number of overseas territories of the United States also have opted out of the practice.
There are a few other states that have voted to switch to year-round Daylight Savings Time – but, unlike opting out of Daylight Savings altogether, such a move requires Congressional approval to take effect.
States that take this route make me wonder what advantages year-round Daylight Savings has over year-round Standard Time that some states are willing to put up with waiting our Federal Legislature to overcome its partisan stalemate before their resolutions take effect. Supposedly the advantage is that, unlike year-round Standard Time, year-round Daylight Savings Time will give people an extra hour after work for daylight activities and give children an extra hour to play in the sun after school. Little do they realize that there is another, very obvious way to accomplish this using year-round Standard Time – that being to switch from a 9-to-5 workday to an 8-to-4 workday schedule and likewise starting and ending school hours nominally an hour earlier as well.
Unless there are Federal restrictions that prevent what I just suggested (and I admit, I don’t know if there are) this would seem like a much more sensible approach than adding to the load for an already gridlocked Federal legislature to fall behind on, and one more thing to have on their plate if they ever do manage to overcome that gridlock.
Speaking of the Federal government, there is also talk on that level as well of abolishing the bi-annual shift of the clocks. However, that isn’t really anything new. Talk of such chronometric reform has been heard there every year for as long as I can remember – and legislatures far more functional than the current one have come and gone without ever granting us relief.
As sad as it is to say, if you dread that fiddling with the clock twice a year as I dread it, there is no relief in sight. We will probably have to continue to endure this for the foreseeable future.
