Have you ever wondered why we shift time each spring and fall? It’s not so bad when we gain an hour, but losing an hour - like this past weekend - leaves me exhausted for days. And I am not alone. There are 20-30 percent of us yawn who our way through the week, especially if we are already sleep-deprived due to busy family and work lives.
Intrigued over the years by our time shifting tradition, I did a bit of research on daylight savings time and learned that it was the brainchild of Benjamin Franklin and some of his European pals. Our very own Congress later chiseled the custom into U.S. law and empowers the Department of Transportation to oversee our time shift twice a year. Reading the related legislation is quite a hoot and exemplifies how seriously Congress takes itself, but that’s another article.
Anyway, Franklin set forth the idea of shifting time as a way of being economical. He calculated enormous savings to be found by burning fewer candles. Based on his analysis, something like 64,050,000 pounds of wax and tallow would be spared each year in Paris alone. I’m not sure what the wax and tallow special interest groups thought about this, but the time shifting idea quickly grew legs.
At the time, Franklin was an American delegate in Paris and he had difficulty getting around due to gout and gallstones. So his Parisian buddies encouraged him to work on simple but important problems. Sort of like occupational therapy, I suppose. This led him to write a series of essays, one of which he called An Economical Project. In it, he discussed his notion of saving candlewax and how the economic advantages of spending more awake time in the daylight had probably not occurred to the Parisians because they never woke before noon anyway.
Thus, over 227 years after Franklin proposed time shifting, we dutifully set our clocks to spring forth on the second Sunday each March and to fall back on the first Sunday in November. Because no one messes with the Department of Transportation. Well, except for Arizona and Hawaii and a couple of rebellious American territories that decline to participate in the bi-annual time change.
All this is just fine because, as Einstein assured us, time is relative.
So that’s the skinny on how daylight savings time came to be. And while we aren’t very worried about wax and tallow costs in this century, the extra hour of daylight from March through October does result in some energy savings, according to a study by the Department of Energy. However, a California Energy Commission’s study found little to no effect on energy consumption as a result of daylight savings time in that particular state. And others criticize the practice of time shifting for various reasons.
Advocates note that daylight savings time gives us one more hour to be productive, exercise and stimulate the economy by shopping and such. This sounds OK in theory, but I for one am already overworked, running too many errands and overspent. Nevertheless, I do enjoy late night sunsets on my deck each summer and that bit of extra daylight each evening to watch my busy back yard birds.
No doubt, the debate over time shifting will continue. In the meantime, we will continue to comply with the Department of Transportation and change our clocks twice a year. Yes, many of us will be tired this week, but we’ll bounce back.
Ben Franklin would be proud.
(Source: woodstock.patch.com)
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