The Fading Of The Light
It’s that time of the year again when clocks have been set back and darkness now descends early in the evening – and gone is the lovely daylight that buoyed our spirits throughout the long-lit summer evenings.
Human Conventions And The Sun
So how did this convention of human beings setting back time ever occur in the first place?
The Flexible Hour of Ancient Rome
The idea of adapting to daylight hours was first practiced in ancient times there was a form of daylight savings in ancient Rome.
They achieved this through a form of flexible hour in which they chopped the daylight into the same number of units in the summer and the winter.
Therefore, each unit or ‘hour’ was longer in the summer and shorter in the winter and so it would get dark at the same ‘hour’ in summer and winter.
Even to this day, some monasteries use such unequal hours.
Benjamin Franklin Admonishes the Parisians
As you can glean from the quotation in the Quillcards ecard at the beginning of this article, Benjamin Franklin valued time greatly.
And so it was centuries later in 1784 that he revived the concept of flexible, daylight hours in his playful essay on daylight saving which he submitted anonymously to the editors of The Journal Of Paris.
His satire proposed waking the Parisians by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. In addition, he suggested that shutters that kept out the sunshine should be taxed and that candles should be rationed.
The Value of Sunlight
Franklin even detailed for the six months between the 20th of March and the 20th of September the number of nights, hours, inhabitants, candles, and monetary expense that “the city of Paris might save every year, by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.”
Franklin never proposed anything like our daylight savings time, however. Like ancient Rome, the society of France during the 18th century did not keep precise schedules.
The Effect Of The Steam Engine and Timetables
At the beginning of the 19th century, however, the first steam engine was invented which led to modern railroads, trains, and timetables.
This in turn led to the need for a standardization of time that was unnecessary in earlier centuries.
Hats Off To the New Zealander George Vernon Hudson
Towards the end of the 19th century in 1895, modern DST (‘Daylight Standard Time’, also known in England as British ‘summer time’) was first proposed by a New Zealand entomologist named George Vernon Hudson.
Hudson did shift work, and this gave him time on his own to collect insects – and made him acutely conscious of the value of after-hours daylight.
This awareness led to his 1895 paper presented to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift. Due to the considerable interest that this paper generated, he wrote another paper three years later on the topic.
William Willett, The Indefatigable English Campaigner
Many sources incorrectly credit a prominent English builder named William Willett with the invention of DST.
However, Willett was a great lover of the outdoors and he was indeed an indefatigable campaigner on its behalf.
Willett was an avid golfer who hated cutting his games short at dusk. Then one day in 1905 when he was out for a ride before breakfast, he noticed that so many Londoners weren’t up and that instead they slept through what he considered a large part of a summer day.
Willett’s ‘The Waste of Daylight’
Two years later, Willett proposed his solution to this problem through his pamphlet entitled ‘The Waste of Daylight’ in which he suggested advancing the summer clock by 80 minutes broken down into twenty minutes forward on successive Sundays in April; and then turning back the autumn clock by the same amount on Sundays in September.
Cutting the Energy Bills
Besides his proposal that would enable people to devote more time to outdoor recreation, Willett also figured that this plan would save about £2.5 million ($4.1 million) in lighting costs.
Big-Name Supporters In England
At the time, King Edward VII and Winston Churchill also supported the idea of DST as did the managing director of Harrods, the iconic luxury department store in London.
Still A No-Go Plan
Nevertheless, several other leading figures in Britain at that time weren’t keen on the idea and so it never came about.
Willett himself kept up his lobbying, never having seen it successfully adopted when he died in 1915.
An Interesting Aside
One can say that Willett lives on these days in one way, namely that his great-great grandson Chris Martin is the lead vocalist and primary songwriter of the band Coldplay.
The First Adoption of Our Current DST (‘Daylight Savings Time’)
Getting back to the subject of the clocking of sunshine, if Willett had lived just another year until April 1916, he would have seen the first adoption of DST by Germany and its allies as a means to conserve coal during World War One.
Other Nations Follow Suit
Britain, most of its allies, and other European neutral countries soon followed this lead, while Russia and several other countries waited until l917 to adopt the plan. In 1918, the United States joined as well.
A Controversial Human Adjustment
Since that time, DST has gone through various mutations, adjustments, and the like. The practice is controversial.
The Pros and Cons of DST
Here’s how DST stacks up on both sides of the aisle:
On one hand, adding daylight to the afternoons is beneficial for the retail sector, sports, and other activities where having sunlight after working hours is a boon. Traffic accidents and fatalities are also reduced where there are extra hours of sun.
On the other hand, the additional hours of sunlight cause problems for farmers, other occupations linked to the sun, and evening entertainment.
Neither Fish Nor Fowl
Otherwise, it is not clear what the effect of this extra daylight is on health and crime.
Furthermore, whereas an early goal of DST was to reduce the evening usage of incandescent light and light bulbs, these days the patterns and types of modern heating and cooling differ greatly so the benefits are not that clear.
Lastly, there is not much research about how DST affects energy use and it is often contradictory.
Spring Forward, Fall Back
Nevertheless, what prevails all around the world today is still the ‘spring forward, fall back’ pattern, as the mnemonic rhyme indicates: Clocks are adjusted one hour forward near the beginning of spring for DST, and then they are adjusted backwards in autumn as we have recently done once again this year.
And in readjusting our clocks this time of the year, most of us extend a wistful good-bye to those extra hours of sunlight up there in the skies that now seem to darken way too early in the day.
References:
Wikipedia
Benjamin Franklin’s Essay On Daylight Saving
The Guardian – Guide To The Night
