How many of you forgot to set your clocks back this morning?
I mean, other than me.
And, no, I was not taking a stand against authoritarian dictates that capriciously assume obedience on the part of the masses.
I just forgot.
Although that first excuse sounds better.
Anyway, I do despise the fact that I have to spend time readjusting clocks and timers all about my house and automobiles twice a year.
Believe it or not, some of us haven't totally turned our lives over to Skynet, although I have to admit it's pretty dang convenient having so many of my gadgets set themselves while I grow stupider and more dependent on them each day ceding all decision making to the all powerful…
Wait, where was I?
Daylight Saving Time.
(Before we go any further, everything I'm about to tell you I got from the Internet, so you know it's true.)
As annoying as it is to change the clocks twice a year, it could have been worse.
A lot worse.
My two favorites:
"In 1895, (George Vernon) Hudson presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a 2-hour shift forward in October and a 2-hour shift back in March. There was interest in the idea, but it was never followed through."
Because it was nuts.
"In 1905, independently from Hudson, British builder William Willett suggested setting the clocks ahead 20 minutes on each of the four Sundays in April, and switching them back by the same amount on each of the four Sundays in September, a total of eight time switches per year."
I take it back. That's nuts.
While it wasn't a proposal to institute Daylight Saving Time (DST), and went nowhere, Benjamin Franklin may have laid the original groundwork for the idea.
"In a letter to the editor of the Journal of Paris, which was entitled ‘An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light,' Franklin simply suggested that Parisians could economize candle usage by getting people out of bed earlier in the morning."
It was an energy-saving plan.
Benjamin Franklin: America's first climate warrior.
Why do we have DST? Not because of farmers. They in fact opposed the first bill that would have instituted a daylight saving time. I was told it was for the farmers my entire childhood. Then again, I was told a lot of things in my childhood, Santa was real, the news media was unbiased, and there was no way you could be sucked down a bathtub drain.
I'm not giving that one up. I mean, it's possible.
Daylight saving time was in fact an attempt to shift people's work schedules to better match up with morning light thus saving energy, which hearkens back to Franklin's original reasoning.
By the way, Franklin says he was joking.
That's right. DST was a huge prank.
Benjamin Franklin, pwning everyone centuries later.
As it turns out, the concept of DST goes back even further.
"Although modern DST has only been used for about 100 years, ancient civilizations are known to have engaged in comparable practices thousands of years ago. For example, the Roman water clocks used different scales for different months of the year to adjust the daily schedules to the solar time."
The earlier implementations in this country were rather chaotic, with time changes being left to individual states and even cities to make their own decisions.
This was driving transportation companies batty trying to adjust time schedules and so in 1966, DST was standardized nationally. That is also why DST adjustment and administration is under the Department of Transportation.
What a fascinating history.
But with modern schedules, shift work, home offices and the like, we should end it.
Right now, before we give back that hour in the spring.
