Spring Forward! Now? What are we doing? What time is it?
Categories: In the News , Nonfiction
It is, alas, time to set the clocks forward an hour to ostensibly "save" an hour of daylight every day. This coming Saturday night/Sunday morning at 2 AM it will suddenly become 3 AM.
According to Michael Downing in his 2005 book, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, normal everyday people do not really understand why we change our clocks. As he says, however, quoting a friend, "Time is quantifiable, but that doesn't mean time is a quantity." Um, I still don't understand.
In Seize the Daylight by David Prerau, we learn that the idea of Daylight Saving Time goes back to Benjamin Franklin, but it was put into practice in Europe and the US during World War I. Don't blame the farmers, it wasn't their fault. It was war, manufacturing, and the government that did it.
The time change is a hot topic of conversation. Everyone has an opinion, probably because it affects everyone. David Prerau says, "It seems like such a simple gesture. Spring forward, fall back. Does anyone know what we're doing?"
This year we will have more and presumably better Daylight Saving Time, since Congress decided to start DST on the second Sunday in March instead of the last Sunday in April and extend it until the first Sunday in November instead of the last Sunday in October. We get 4 extra weeks of saved daylight! If only we could bank the sunlight and draw interest!
It has been difficult enough to live, as we do in Cincinnati, so near a time zone line in Indiana. It increased the confusion to mix in the fact that for half the year in that time zone to the west the clocks are the same as ours and for half the year the clocks are an hour behind ours (...but which half of the year are we in?)
I remember as a little girl hearing my grandmother, who lived in Indianapolis, referring to whatever time it was there as "real time". They did not observe Daylight Saving Time in most of Indiana, but someone has finally decided that they have to. Now they will be just as off kilter as the rest of us. Maybe even more so because they are not used to it.
Standard time grew out of the 1647 establishment of Greenwich Mean Time, developed as an aid for maritime travelers to determine Longitude. In the US it wasn't until March 19, 1918, that Congress established Standard Time. There was an extremely confusing array of times across the country until then, contributing to mix-ups regarding the railways and causing some train accidents.
Two extremely interesting books on the establishment of standardized time are
- Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time (2000) by Clark Blaise
- Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeping in America (2000) by Ian R. Bartky, about exploitation of time as a commodity
