Daylight Saving Time
ID: 050502.1636
Whenever I feel overwhelmed by human depredations, I like to think about our collective silliness. It's like being mugged and noticing your mugger's socks don't match.
On Sunday, May 1, 2005, BookTV (C-SPAN2) presented Michael Downing speaking at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, Massachusetts about his new book, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. (The subject is quite popular. David Prerau also has a new book on this subject, Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time.) BookTV summarized Downing's book as arguing daylight saving time "is the most unscientific public policy ever perpetrated."
I am not perplexed or otherwise annoyed by daylight saving or standard time. By a curious combination of sloth and forgetfulness, it usually takes me several months to reset clocks. Sometime around June or July, or December/January — whichever comes first — I'm always struck by the thought of simply setting the clocks forward or back a half hour and be done with it forever.
Benjamin Frankling, in what the Encyclopaedia Britannica calls a "whimsical essay" first suggested daylight saving time in 1784. According to Downing, Franklin also suggested it some years later to the French when, walking home at sunrise from a night's revels, he noticed French homes shuttered against Homer's "rosey-fingered dawn." Franklin proposed the government fire off cannons to waken their sluggish citizens. (Daylight saving time notwithstanding, the laziness of the French is still questioned. In an April 29, 2005 article for the International Herald Tribune, To French Workers, minutes add up, Thomas Fuller quotes a headline from Le Parisien: "The French don't want to work.")
But it's William Willett, another early riser who, on an early morning horseback ride in England during the summer of 1905, noticed he was the only early bird. In 1907 he campaigned for setting the clock ahead by 80 minutes in four moves of 20 minutes each during the spring and summer months. The rest is, as they say, history. (Downing points out Willet was also an avid golfer, and may have been moved as much by a desire to expand his hours on the greens, as by anything else.)
Michael Downing admits dayling savings time was an odd subject for him. Teaching creative writing at Tufts University, he also wrote Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center (2001), as well as works of fiction like Breakfast with Scot, Perfect Agreement, Mother of God, and A Narrow Time. But then, the history of daylight saving time might as well be fiction.
During the question and answer period, Downing noted that in 1870, Sir Sandford Fleming, a Canadian railway planner and engineer, outlined the plan for worldwide standard time, dividing Earth into 24 standard meridians 15° of longitude apart, starting with the prime meridian through Greenwich, England; Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The same unscientific policy that makes daylight saving time an international fiasco however, conspired against Fleming's design, attributing as many as three days to any 24-hour period.
Why can't we, Downing asked, all use Greenwich Mean Time, making it for example, 08:00 worldwide? 23:00 in San Francisco would simultaneously be 23:00 in London, Singapore, Tokyo or anywhere else on the globe. What it'd mean, he conceded, is some people might start work at, for example, 6:00, while others started at 9:00, still others at 18:00, and so on. The payoff would be if you asked anyone anywhere on Earth to telephone you at 17:00, they'd know exactly when to dial, and you'd know — without calculation — exactly when to pick up the receiver.
And that's the funny part. For all his witty anecdotes, and clever insights into our collective madness, Downing's suggestion is, like the unscientific policy he derides, sensible only if not examined. All it does is unload the confusion between what time it is in Tokyo, to puzzling out what time people start working there.
But then, he's not mugging me either.
I apologize for having dragged you into the confusion of our clocks. When I was writing SPRING FORWARD: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving, I did (as you note) come to admire Sanford Fleming's proposal for "cosmopolitan time." His elegant idea--that there is but one day on the face of the earth, which a 24-hour clock would reflect by making it, say, 11:00 in London, Tokyo, and New York at the same moment--still seems preferable to the madness we now encounter when we try to figure out what time it is somewhere else. More problematic than the math we must do just to know what time it is in Beijing is the fact that we typically don't realize that our math yields the wrong answer. Daylight Saving Time is one of the culprits, but not the only one.
Fleming knew this would happen. That's why he suggested we adopt a clock time that reliably tells us the time everywhere every day of the year.
If it is noon in New York, what time is it Paris, Tokyo, or Sidney? You need to know that New York time is Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) minus 5. You also need to know the GMT in the other city. That's just for starters. If it's Paris whose time you want to establish, you have to know what month it is. (Europe begins Daylight Saving a week before New York. And our House of Representatives recently voted to add two months of daylight saving to America's calendars every year, which will only make matters worse.) If it's Tokyo, you need to know that Japan has no national daylight-saving policy. If it's Sidney, you must remember that the clocks in the Southern Hemisphere spring forward when our clocks fall back by an hour. And only about 70 countries in the world practice Daylight Saving. And, should China be on your mind (as it is on the mind of most businesses these days), you will need to know that China ignores it's four designated GMT time zones; the whole nation operates on Beijing Time, and they don't use daylight saving.
Thus, my admiration for Sandford Fleming and his simple idea.
— Michael Downing