COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:What’s the time?

Did you remember? If you didn’t, not to worry, lots of people don’t. Sunday morning, no stress, no strain, it’s easy to forget daylight saving time. It’s one of those things everyone takes for granted but nobody understands. We know we get an extra hour of daylight in the spring, which we give back in the fall, but that’s about it. It’s like dry cleaning — we all do it but no one can explain it.

Where did daylight saving time come from? I’ve heard about as many explanations for daylight saving time as I have for the price of gasoline, and none of them make much sense.

By the way, does it seem like it came a little early this year? It did. You are not only good looking but also really smart.

In 2005, the people in Washington, who as you know are there to help, decreed that daylight saving time starts three weeks earlier than it used to, which was the first Sunday in April but now is the second Sunday in March, which is today.

The theory is that we will save oodles of energy because the extra hour of daylight means we can put off turning those lights on three weeks sooner than in the old days, which was last year.

But here’s why daylight saving time is still in the folder with how dry cleaning works.

The energy-saving theory has been tossed around for years, but whenever someone at a university or a think tank tests it, it doesn’t work. Almost every study says that adding an hour of daylight is basically a push as far as energy consumption goes. People will use more lights in the early morning, with daylight coming an hour later, which offsets the extra hour of daylight in the evening, and some people will stay later at work, etc., etc.

Computer techs are also really stressed about the new system because they’re not certain how the internal clocks in computers and PDAs and cellphones and who knows what all are going to react — sort of a mini-Y2K.

So why do we do this twice-a-year, spring-forward-fall-back thing?

For a long time, people had a vague idea that it was done to benefit farmers, which is ironic, because farmers hate daylight saving time with a passion. Next time you’re on a farm, take a close look at the cows. Have you ever seen a cow looking at a clock or wearing a watch? Neither had anyone else. Cows couldn’t care less what time it is. When they need to be milked, they need to be milked. Period. Farmers and cows both stumble out of bed at exactly the same time every day regardless of where the big hand is or isn’t.

Other people have a distant memory that it had something to do with World War I or World War II. That makes more sense than the Farmer-John-and-thecows-like-it theory and is much closer to the truth.

But it really started with Ben Franklin.

Not only did Ben invent just about everything you’ve ever heard of, he did it on a few hours sleep a night. He loved to stay up until three or four in the morning, chatting with friends, playing cards or chess and consuming mass quantities of wine and beer. While he was ambassador to France, a Parisian newspaper ran one of his essays in which he suggested setting the clocks forward one hour in the spring to delay the dawn so he could sleep a little longer. Surprisingly, Franklin’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion caused a stir in Europe and back home.

A few places here and in Europe fooled with the idea, but the two-step time shuffle didn’t really start until 100 years later, when a Brit named William Willett proposed moving the clocks up 20 minutes on each Sunday in April and setting them back by the same amounts on four Sundays in September. Willet’s proposal was beaten down after a fierce campaign waged by — anyone? Right you are, British farmers.

On this side of the Big Pond, in March 1918, Congress passed the Act to Preserve Daylight and Provide Standard Time. Notice that last part: “Standard Time.”

Believe it or not, there was no standard time, or time zones, in the United States until 1883. Even then, standard time wasn’t the law of the land, but a system used by U.S. and Canadian railroads.

Before then, time was basically whatever the locals said it was. Everyone in town set their watch by the clock tower or the church bells or a clock in the jeweler’s window. It might be off by a few minutes or a whole lot of minutes now and then, but when the clock or the bell tower said it was half past noon, it was half past noon, and that was the end of it, darn it. Needless to say, with everybody keeping their own time in 48 states and thousands of towns, making the trains run on time was really hard, until Congress passed the aforementioned Standard Time Act of 1918.

Once again, the farmers hated it. They raised hell down on the farm and elsewhere until Congress repealed daylight saving in 1919.

When World War II started, FDR reintroduced daylight saving time as an emergency energy-saving measure. It was observed all year long, was called “war time” rather than daylight saving time, and was lifted, again, when the war was over.

Twenty years later, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which standardized exactly when the big hand would be moved back, or forward, then officially adopted daylight saving time in 1973 as a response to supposed gas crisis — don’t get me started on that. When some of the states squawked, individual states were allowed to opt out of daylight saving time, which Arizona, Hawaii and Indiana did, and still do.

So now you know — the convoluted and somewhat bizarre story of daylight, saving time, Farmer John and Elsie. Personally, however it started, I think we still do it because most people want all the daylight they can get, thank you, especially when things warm up. If the cows have an issue with that, they’ll just have to deal with it. Moo.

I gotta go.