A Little Article About Daylight Savings

image: christina larson

In 1784 in Paris, Benjamin Franklin presented a paper called “ “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light”, suggesting that Parisians could economize candle usage by getting people out of bed earlier in the morning. As usual Franklin was ahead of his time. The world finally caught up to the idea of altering time to save energy in WW1.
The rationale is that adding an extra hour of light at the end of the day saves on using energy. FDR actually instituted daylight savings (DST) for the duration of WW2 …and called it ‘Wartime’ But several studies have suggested that Energy consumption actually increases during daylight savings mostly due to increased air conditioning use. We are in throes of global warming after all! Some people hate daylight savings (Haters!) and there is actually a website dedicated to eradicating it called standardtime.com. Why would anyone hate it? Maybe it’s because there is a significant increase in traffic accidents the Monday after the spring shift forward. But then there is an equal decrease in traffic accidents when we turn back the clocks in fall. Hmmm…Robberies fall by 7% the day of the spring shift, but heart attacks increase by 10%.
 In the 1960s, the United States created the ‘Uniform Time Act’ which created the time zones (can you imagine living without time zones?) and allowed states to exempt themselves from DST. At present only Hawaii and Arizona have exempted themselves. If you go to the Hoover Dam, Arizona is on one side of the dam and Nevada on the other. When I visited, their clocks were set an hour apart. I kept walking back and forth between the hour difference. It felt so arbitrary.

---