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This switch in time holds the promise of summer
© St. Petersburg Times Benjamin Franklin was one of the first people on record to come up with the idea of daylight saving time. Franklin thought it was silly during the summer "to live much by candlelight and sleep by sunshine." But if, on this first weekday morning of the new time, you had to light a candle to get around, don't blame old Ben. The real culprit is the U.S. Congress. Since 1986, most of us in the United States have switched to daylight time on the first Sunday of April, and returned to standard time on the final Sunday of October. That means we spend more than half of each calendar year living an hour ahead of the "real" time, or as my Great Aunt Annie insisted on calling it, "God's time." The summer I spent with her, I tried to convince her the Almighty had no opinion on the matter. She would neither budge nor change her clocks. The mechanics of the change are well-known to us -- who has never heard the saying, "Spring forward, fall back"? But the actual moment always strikes me as a little mystic. At the appointed hour, 2 a.m. magically becomes 3 a.m., to the dismay of late-night revelers and early risers alike. In the fall, 2 a.m. becomes 1 a.m., and we have that rare gift, the chance to live an hour over again. Too bad we cannot pick and choose the hour. Before 1986, daylight time had a spotty and non-uniform history. Great Britain first used it during World War I as an economy measure. We Americans tried it in 1918 and repealed it a year later. But lots of localities liked the idea and kept using it unofficially. America went on daylight time around the year during World War II. By the 1960s, our nation was a crazy-quilt of time. There were 28 states using daylight time, 14 on a statewide basis and the rest by local option. Eleven of these states observed daylight time from April to October, but 17 others began and ended in different months. Such a hodgepodge led Congress to pass the Uniform Time Act of 1966. The law declared that all states either would observe daylight saving time from the last Sunday in April to the first Sunday in October, or else decide to exempt their entire state. In 1972, the law was amended to allow states in more than one time zone to use daylight time in one zone, and not the other, so that the whole state would be uniform. The energy crisis of the 1970s led us to impose daylight time from Jan. 6 to Oct. 27 in 1974, and from Feb. 23 to Oct. 26 of 1975. Eleven years later, Congress finally put us on our current schedule. Of the states, only Hawaii, the eastern time zone of Indiana and the state of Arizona demur. The original rationale for daylight time was to save energy, because people would spend more of their waking hours in the sunshine (hence, "saving daylight"). Later on, supporters tried to argue that it is safer because there is more light in the evening for us to avoid accidents. Ha! Try to tell that to people driving their kids to bus stops on a pitch-dark April morning. No wonder there always have been some who would like to see the whole scheme scrapped, except maybe in times of emergency. Still, I like daylight saving, for a simple reason: It evokes an immediate and powerful gut-level feeling of summertime. After all, we take many of our physical and psychological cues from light. The same daily rituals, performed with an extra hour's light, can somehow feel very different. There is a lot to be said for getting home from work while the sun is still in the sky. As the season waxes toward midsummer, there will be more and more light left in each day, until our dinner times are not a ritual of evening at all, but almost a late-day break before all the things to come. In those evenings, then, one might sit on the back porch, savoring a tomato sandwich and a glass of iced tea, and still ponder the idea of mowing the grass afterward. Or maybe the neighbors will wander over across the street and say hello. In a little bit we could put the dog on the leash and walk around the block ourselves. Or maybe all of that. There will be plenty of time. -- Sources: Facts on File (1963, 1966); U.S. Naval Observatory; World Book Encyclopedia. -- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.
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Times columns today Howard Troxler John Romano Sara Fritz From the Times Metro desk |
