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fall back - time goes back

daylight saving time ends tonight at 2am. don't forget to set your clocks back!

a little bonus history on daylight saving time so this isn't a total waste of space.

daylight saving time (dst; also summer time in british english) is the convention of advancing clocks so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn; several ancient cultures lengthened each summer daylight hour instead. modern dst was first proposed in 1907 by william willett, and saw its first widespread use in 1916 as a wartime measure aimed at conserving coal. despite controversy, many countries have used it since then; details vary by location and change occasionally.

adding daylight to afternoons generally benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours, but it can cause problems for farmers and others whose hours depend on the sun. extra afternoon daylight appears to cut traffic fatalities; its effect on health and crime is less clear. an early goal was to reduce evening usage of incandescent lighting, formerly a primary use of electricity; nowadays, though, dst sometimes increases overall electricity costs and peak demand.

although not punctual in the modern sense, the ancients adjusted daily schedules to the sun more flexibly than modern dst does, often dividing daylight into 12 equal hours regardless of day length, so that each daylight hour was longer during summer. for example, roman water clocks had different scales for different months of the year: at rome's latitude the third hour from sunrise, hora tertia, started in modern terms at 09:02 solar time and lasted 44 minutes at the winter solstice, but at the summer solstice it started at 06:58 and lasted 75 minutes. after ancient times, equal-length civil hours eventually supplanted unequal, so civil time no longer varies by season. unequal hours are still used in a few traditional settings, such as some mount athos monasteries.

benjamin franklin suggested firing cannons at sunrise to waken parisians. during his time as an american envoy to france, benjamin franklin anonymously published a letter in 1784 suggesting that parisians economize on candles by arising earlier to use morning sunlight. franklin's satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise, in the spirit of his earlier proverb "early to bed and early to rise / makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." franklin did not propose shifting clocks; like ancient rome, 18th-century europe did not keep accurate schedules. however, this soon changed as rail and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in franklin's day.

william willett invented dst and advocated it tirelessly. in 1905, the prominent english builder and outdoorsman william willett was inspired to invent dst during one of his pre-breakfast horseback rides, when he observed with dismay how many londoners slept through the best part of a summer day. an avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk. his solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later. he lobbied unsuccessfully for the proposal until his death in 1915. wartime germany, its allies, and their occupied zones were the first european countries to use dst, starting 1916-04-30. britain, most other belligerents, and many european neutrals soon followed suit, but russia and a few other countries waited until the next year, and the united states did not use it until 1918. since then the world has seen many enactments, adjustments, and repeals.

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11/3/2007
by Nny

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