100 years later, the madness of daylight saving time endures

PROMO 660 x 440 - Miscellaneous Time Change
Published Friday, March 9, 2018

File 20180308 30994 bzca2a.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1
Unfortunately, there's not an unlimited amount of daylight that we can squeeze out of our clocks. igorstevanovic/Shutterstock.com

Michael Downing, Tufts University

One hundred years after Congress passed the first daylight saving legislation, lawmakers in Florida this week passed the "Sunshine Protection Act," which will make daylight saving a year-round reality in the Sunshine State.

If approved by the federal government, this will effectively move Florida's residents one time zone to the east, aligning cities from Jacksonville to Miami with Nova Scotia rather than New York and Washington, D.C.

The cost of rescheduling international and interstate business and commerce hasn't been calculated. Instead, relying on the same overly optimistic math that led the original proponents of daylight saving to predict vast energy savings, crisper farm products harvested before the morning dew dried and lessened eye strain for industrial workers, Florida legislators are lauding the benefits of putting "more sunshine in our lives."


Making the trains run on time


To railroad companies around the world, that wasn't acceptable. They needed synchronized, predictable station times for arrivals and departures, so they proposed splitting up the globe into 24 time zones.



From patriotic duty to moneymaking scheme



It didn't go smoothly. In 1918, Easter Sunday fell on March 31, which led to a lot of latecomers to church services. Enraged rural and evangelical opponents thereafter blamed daylight saving for subverting sun time, or "God's time." Newspapers were deluged by letter writers complaining that daylight saving upset astronomical data and made almanacs useless, prevented Americans from enjoying the freshest early morning air, and even browned out lawns unaccustomed to so much daylight.




Actress Barbara Lawrence reminds television viewers to set the clock ahead, from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m., on April 29, 1956. AP Photo

This wasn't exactly ideal. A 35-mile bus trip from Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, West Virginia, passed through seven distinct local time zones. The U.S. Naval Observatory dubbed the world's greatest superpower "the world's worst timekeeper."


Great for golf - but what about everyone else?

Why do we still do it?

Today we know that changing the clocks does influence our behavior. For example, later sunset times have dramatically increased participation in afterschool sports programs and attendance at professional sports events. In 1920, The Washington Post reported that golf ball sales in 1918 - the first year of daylight saving - increased by 20 percent.


But the promised energy savings - the presenting rationale for the policy - have never materialized.


Lawmakers in Florida, of all places, ought to know that year-round daylight saving is not such a bright idea - especially in December and January, when most residents of the Sunshine State won't see sunrise until about 8 a.m.

On Jan. 8, 1974, Richard Nixon forced Floridians and the entire nation into a year-round daylight saving - a vain attempt to stave off an energy crisis and lessen the impact of an OPEC oil embargo.

But before the end of the first month of daylight saving that January, eight children died in traffic accidents in Florida, and a spokesperson for Florida's education department attributed six of those deaths directly to children going to school in darkness.

The ConversationLesson learned? Apparently not.

Michael Downing, Lecturer in Creative Writing, Tufts University
