Does Daylight Savings Time Matter?
October 30, 2011, By Craig J. Heimbuch 1 comment
Whether you call it by the actual name - Daylight Saving Time - or give it that extra 's' and call it Daylight Savings Time, the end result is the same. You gain an extra hour of your day.
Let's get the Public Service Announcement part of this over with first: Daylight Saving Time ends at 2 a.m. on November 6 in the US and Canada and on October 30 in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Don't forget to set your clock back an hour before going to bed the night before—or do as I do and completely forget only to be reminded by the clock on my DVR mysteriously being an hour behind all the rest in my house the next day.
The time change means it's time to replace the batteries in all your smoke detectors and the filter in your high-efficiency furnace—which experts recommend changing four times a year. There. Public service rendered.
But if you're like me, you might ask yourself why. Why do we have this crazy system where we bend time twice yearly?
Well, if you live in most of Arizona, Central and South American, North and South Africa, Asia and all but the southwest corner of Australia, ignore this question. Daylight Savings Time no longer affects you, and if you live in Central Africa, the Middle East or a giant swath of Pacific Island nations, it never did. But for the rest of us, you might assume that Daylight Savings Time had something to do with early agrarian lifestyles. You would, however, be wrong.
It's true that going as far back as ancient Rome, the practice of marking time has been impacted by the tilt of the Earth on its axis. In the case of ancient Rome, a day was evenly divided into 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night. This meant hours were not necessarily comprised of 60 minutes. The Romans built a system in which the third hour of each half of the day was shifted in length to accommodate varying daylight lengths. During the summer, the third hour of daytime could be as long as 75 minutes, while in the winter it could be as few as 45. Confusing, I know, but also sort of irrelevent. In fact, rigid adherence to the 60-minute hour is a relatively new thing.
If you've seen "National Treasure," you may recall the scene in which Nicholas Cage is trying to figure out the precise time of day to visit the former site of the Liberty Bell in order to retrieve the magic glasses that reveal the map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. He holds a water bottle up to the back of a hundred-dollar bill and notices the time on the clock in the painting. He then checks his watch and realizes he's missed it, only to be corrected by his sidekick, who reminds Cage and his femme fatale that they had not, in fact, missed the time because Daylight Savings had not been invented yet. Riley, the aforementioned sidekick, then goes on to say that Benjamin Franklin was the first to propose DST.
Sorry, did I forget to say "spoiler alert?"
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