David Prerau: Seize the Daylight. The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005.
The first thing I learned from Prerau’s excellent little book is that it is not mere pedantry to call it Daylight “Saving” Time instead of Daylight “Savings” Time, as I have my whole life. The idea is that by switching the clocks we are saving daylight that would otherwise be wasted while we sleep. But I suppose the language patterns of “savings bank” and “savings account” are too strong to be resisted.
The second thing I learned is that virtually all the arguments advanced even today against DST were already put forward when the idea was first seriously proposed in the early 20th century. I must say that the author is so fair that after reading this book, which is pro DST, I have more respect for the contra arguments. The dairy farmers do have a legitimate beef, if you will pardon the expression.
Robert Frost, before he had any success as a poet, tried to make a living as a farmer in New England. By all accounts, he was not very good at it. Late at night, after the rest of the family had gone to bed, he would stay up late, composing poems on the kitchen table, going out to observe the starry sky when he got stuck. As a result, he got up late in the morning. Sometimes he didn’t milk the cows until noon. He’s supposed to have said, “The cows got used to it quicker than the neighbors did.”
And that’s been pretty much my attitude to those who oppose DSL and almost invariably mention “the cows.” It may not accord with ancient tradition, and it may not make sense at all places and all times (countries near the equator have little need for it), but for the most part, it is eminently practical. As Winston Churchill said long ago, DSL is not a change “from natural time to artificial time.” Rather, it substitutes “a convenient standard of artificial time for an inconvenient standard of artificial time.” Few people are inconvenienced by DSL for more than a day, if that.
Here in Russia it was President Medvedev who mentioned cows when he arbitrarily reduced the number of time zones (from eleven to nine) and changed the entire country to year-round summer time back in 2011. To critics who say, “If DST is such a good idea, let’s move the time zones one hour forward and then leave them there rather than shift back and forth twice a year,” all I can say is: I’m living in a land that did precisely that, and in these northern latitudes it caused nothing but misery during the winter. In December and January it didn’t get light until 10 in the morning. I’m not talking about sunrise – it’s often so cloudy here you don’t see the sun for weeks at a time – I’m talking about a whiter shade of pale.
But not to worry – for a few years now we have had another president who’s made it his mission, it sometimes seems, to undo everything his predecessor did – including the time change. After the Winter Olympics in Sochi, the Russian Federation adjusted the clocks once again, this time to year-round Winter Time! Brilliant. Now it is the summer months that are unbearable. Light in August at 4 a.m.
The most uplifting part of Prerau’s book is the detailed discussion of how democratic societies (most of his examples being taken from the US and the UK) have argued, sometimes at exhaustive length, about this matter from the very beginning. William Willett, the first champion of DSL, originally suggested having eight changes of the clock per year – four in the spring, four in the fall. It was the process of open public discussion – not the whim of the head of state – that led to the situation of compromise and consensus that now obtains in the US, where for example some western parts of Indiana choose to live in a different time zone than the rest of the Hoosier state and everyone is okay with that.
Except maybe for some cows.
Update November 7, 2016
James Gleick, author of Time Travel: A History, has written an op-ed for the NY Times in which he argues that is “time to dump the time zones.” It’s a marvelous piece of satire.
He starts out seriously enough. It’s true, as he says, that the time-zone map is a hodge-podge. At the same time, it is one that has been created by people for their own convenience (plus a few dictatorial states like North Korea and Hitler’s Germany for propaganda purposes). Most places have tinkered with it in an ad hoc kind of way until they are satisfied with the results.
But the status quo lacks rigor and Gleickian simplicity. His solution: We should all live on Greenwich Time, all year round. When it’s noon in Greenwich, it will be noon wherever you live, too. “Our biological clocks can stay with the sun, as they have from the dawn of history.” So that on the other side of the earth from Greenwich, noon would fall in the middle of the night. All in the name of uniformity.
Wouldn’t it be more logical if we all agreed that it is noon when the sun is directly overhead, wherever we happen to live? Which is the way it used to be. Until it proved impractical – for the railroads and their timetables.
Gleick’s whole essay is tongue in cheek, a satire on those who are upset that they have to reset their clocks this coming Sunday. (They were reset in most of Europe a few weeks ago.)
© Hamilton Beck
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