March 31, 2006
Daylight Savings Time Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:00 PM EST Newscasts will be filled tomorrow with reminders to set clocks ahead by an hour for the start of Daylight Saving Time. Most countries, at least those in temperate zones, observe it nowadays, although they vary widely on what dates it begins and ends on. In the United States, since 1986, it has begun on the first Sunday in April and ended on the last Sunday in October for those states that observe it. Hawaii, for one, does not, as daylight in the tropics doesn’t vary all that much from summer to winter. Neither does Arizona observe it (except for the Navajo Nation Indian reservation, which does). Indiana, which straddles the line between the central and eastern time zones, is a hopeless muddle right now. Some parts used to observe it, some did not, but all are supposed to observe it this year. However, the line between the two zones may change to put all of Indiana in the same zone (one wonders why they didn’t do that to start with). Stand by.
Next year Daylight Saving Time is supposed to start on the second Sunday in March and last until the first Sunday in November. There is a problem with that, however, because most computers are programmed to automatically adjust their clocks according to algorithms that are built in and won’t change just because Congress—reminiscent of King Canute and the tide—has commanded them to. Again, stand by.
DST started as a means of conserving fuel in World War I by shifting the daylight from summer mornings, when most people were still asleep, to the evenings, when they were awake. But the germ of the idea arose much earlier, in 1784, when Benjamin Franklin, in Paris, claimed to have been accidentally awaked early one morning in the summer and, his servant having forgotten to close the shutters the night before, been astonished to discover that the sun was already up when he didn’t need it, as he slept till noon. He promptly calculated how many candles Parisians could save if only they would haul themselves out of bed earlier in the day and thus go to sleep earlier as well.
The letter is the great Franklin at his facetious best.
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