Why?
Springing Forward, Falling Back,
and Changing Times
Mr. Matthew Giambrone
As I write this, North America is gearing up to spring forward — that is, to adjust by an hour any remaining clocks that have springs and gears. It is the ceremony by which Daylight Savings Time commences. Thereby saving daylight. Apparently. Or time. Or . . . something.
I had always been given to understand, anecdotally, mostly by my mother, that Daylight Savings Time was founded by Benjamin Franklin and was for the benefit of farmers’ harvest schedules and suchlike. I have conducted a short study of the matter, however, and it turns out neither assertion is true. 
Mr. Franklin did not propose changing our clocks; he seems to have merely suggested that people could wake up at a different time if they wished to have more access to daylight. It also seems he was joking. And there is no evidence of Daylight Savings Time having actually been implemented anywhere until more than a century after his passing. Meanwhile, farmers do not particularly care for Daylight Savings Time and were opposed to its implementation: it turns out things such as roosters crowing, cows engorging, dew evaporating from fields, the total number of hours of sunlight on the earth — these are all stubbornly disinterested in what time Congress claims it is.
Other than a bit of localized experimentation in Canada and some discussion in Europe, Daylight Savings Time did not really start on a grand scale until 1916, in World War I Germany. As far as I can tell, reading between the lines of history, it seems to have started there (and subsequently in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere) as a political labor trick to get more hours out of weapons-factory workers. How does it get more hours out of weapons-factory workers? Well, it creates more daylight during which they can work, right? Wrong. Creating more daylight requires structural alterations to the solar system. How then does it, in fact, produce more working hours?
Here is my theory: employers can force people to stay at work later in the day, once present, more easily than they can convince them to show up earlier. If workers are doing work that requires sunlight (as WWI arms manufacturing, it seems, did), and they are already working in the latter hours until sunset, but aren’t showing up for work until annoyingly long after sunrise, then you could just tell them they must show up earlier and must still stay till sunset. But workers probably would not like that. So instead if the employer (backed up by the government) tells them, “it’s not earlier, you’re still showing up at ‘8:00 AM,’” this for some reason flies more easily. Then people will show up earlier, because it is not earlier, except that it actually is. And then to take advantage of the full spread of “extra” daylight hours they really need to stay all day.
More simply put, it makes Franklin’s “early to rise” thing an easier pill to swallow (or force down someone’s throat). If you come to work earlier in the day but stay till the same (solar) time you used to, that is an extra hour worked. Thereby producing an extra Stielhandgranate. Thereby helping Germany lose World War I more slowly.
More simply put, it makes Franklin’s “early to rise” thing an easier pill to swallow (or force down someone's throat).
Fast forward a century or so. Much of the globe now annually switches to and from DST, which has effects on all of our lives. For a while it affected my life more extensively than just losing an hour of sleep: Years ago I helped develop some systems for the energy industry. Interconnected computers managing the flow of electricity on the power grid must maintain enormous quantities of time-specific data. Due to the twice-a-year switch, we had to do various things such as construe all time as UTC (related to Greenwich Mean Time) and provide special treatment for “shoulder” dates when we transition into and out of Daylight Savings Time — referred to as “Short Day” and “Long Day” because the former has twenty-three hours and the latter has twenty-five. Specifically, Short Day is considered not to have an hour extending from 1:00 AM to 2:00 AM, and Long Day is considered to have two such hours.
If trudging through that last paragraph was a little tedious, consider trudging through systems’ architectures that must interact with myriad other systems, transact billions of data points, and address all of this without any hiccups on those two days of the year. The whole affair was lengthy and costly.
And consider that such an undertaking was, in fact, an infinitesimal percentage of the overall global work that has gone into dealing with issues arising from Daylight Savings Time. If we generously guesstimate that my personal time spent on this accounted for one one-trillionth of a percent of the total human effort and cost eaten up by complications of this chronometric fiction over the past century, I conclude that the human race could have far more affordably just gone ahead with implementing structural alterations to the solar system.
Given such associated expense, and given widespread evidence of increased injuries and health problems and traffic accidents each year due to the disruption to our circadian rhythms, and given the fact that World War I has been over for some time now, why is it that we still do the biannual Daylight Savings dance? Why? This is the critical, resonating question that more and more people are asking (at least as regards Daylight Savings Time). There is some evidence that it saves electricity, but I’m not convinced on the math, and there is counterbalancing speculation that it increases gas consumption. It sounds like the charcoal industry is in favor. Are there others? I enjoy an extra hour after work for grilling as much as the next carnivore, but I’m not certain this merits global horological volatility.
If we, as a society, enjoy getting up an hour earlier but still having the small hand pointing at the nine when businesses open their doors, then I could see permanently setting our clocks ahead an hour. Ontario, Europe, thirteen of the United States, Mr. Rubio, and others in the U.S. Senate seem to be interested in such a thing. Or if we, as a society, like getting up later as a rule, I could see keeping standard time year-round. That is what most of Asia now does.
Either method has merit and inherent logic. Some folks might prefer the former, some the latter; some might not care. I personally stand with the latter, standard time, as it seems more natural. But I can find no coherent explanation for why we ought to switch up our opinion on the matter twice every year, in order to (in name only) “save” daylight in the middle of the year, which, ironically, in the northern hemisphere, is the time when there is the most daylight available and hence the least need to save any even if we could. I am not an expert, but as I see no reason why we should still do it, I will instead observe the two reasons why, I suspect, we do still do it.
The first reason is that times of crisis — World War I, for instance — create rapid change that does not rapidly (or ever) reverse itself. Extraordinary measures and extraordinary powers are always assumed during extraordinary times; after the extraordinary times conclude, the extraordinary measures and powers seem to stick around and become ordinary. It is a post-crisis inertia, which can be comforting to the recently traumatized and convenient to the recently empowered.
It is a post-crisis inertia, which can be comforting to the recently traumatized and convenient to the recently empowered.
The second reason is that people can be easily fooled into not really thinking about something if it is wrapped prettily in the right marketing verbiage. In the United Kingdom, you may hear “British Summer Time.” That’s alright, but it doesn’t really sell me on it. Early on there was discussion of calling it “Willett Time” in honor of William Willett, an enthusiastic proponent. This mostly just risked stupid jokes about “Willett ever end?” But “Daylight Savings Time”? Brilliant. Who could possibly argue against that? Only people who want to waste daylight, obviously. Whatever marketing genius came up with Daylight Savings Time deserves a small bronze placard somewhere. Then flesh it out with rumors about Benjamin Franklin and farmers (daylight saved is daylight earned, after all), and have the loveliest people, such as my mother, pass it along with a slice of apple pie. Large bronze placard.
It is a powerful combination, marketing prowess coupled with post-crisis inertia. The twentieth century was rife with well-marketed, crisis-birthed changes to human existence that did not ever unwind themselves. Regardless of your opinions on Daylight Savings Time, many of the others have been incontrovertibly harmful. As we navigate our own tumultuous century, we must avoid the pitfalls of the last. Part of that navigation is remembering that we should always be asking “why?”
Children know this intuitively; somehow later we forget. We all ought to be asking “why?” with the charmingly obnoxious frequency of any two-year-old. Whenever emergency changes are proposed, we should honestly, intensively, repeatedly ask “why?” Whenever an emergency abates but the changes do not, we ought to ask it again. There may be a good answer, of course; there may not be. And when there is not, we cannot let ourselves be lulled into complacency by the comforts of inertia. We cannot let ourselves be paralyzed by savvy catchphrases with which no one can disagree. We must instead vigilantly and courageously carry on the business of real human discourse and chart our return to real human life. If we do, we will avoid much real human suffering, and we (the common people, at least) will save immeasurable time and money, if perhaps not any daylight. There are times when a moment of crisis calls us to spring forward, but we must also know when it is time to fall back.
