The next time you find yourself carrying out the twice-yearly ritual of trying to get every
clock in your house to just show the same number for once, rest assured you are but
the latest in a long line of people who have attempted–and ultimately failed–to make
time perfectly obey human rules.
Looking at you here, leap years.
Every year, hundreds of millions of people voluntarily turn their lives upside down by
setting their clocks forward one hour in the spring and back one hour in the autumn on
a particular date mandated by the government wherever they happen to live, unless that
government is in one of these states, territories, or countries that doesn’t play along.
Because the only thing more confusing than jumbling up every clock in the world is jumbling
up some of them.
Daylight saving time (yes, it’s singular, not plural) is a perfect example of how a
few people with the best of intentions can end up annoying millions of the rest of us
for the better part of a century.
And it’s time we take an honest look at how we got to this place where half the world
comes unstuck in time twice a year, and ask if the supposed advantages for springing forward
and falling back still hold up…
[MUSIC]
Hey smart people, Joe here.
Let's start with some history!
The first person to dream up daylight saving time was none other than Benjamin Franklin,
who while living in Paris forgot to close his shutters after a late night out and was
rudely awakened by the sun at 6AM instead of his usual hour of noon.
He was astonished to realize that, in fact, the sun makes light as soon as it rises and
everyone was wasting beaucoup money spending part of their waking hours in candlelight
instead of taking advantage of the big bright thing in the sky.
[ROARING NOISE]
He calculated between April and September the people of Paris alone could save $200
million of today’s dollars by getting their lazy bones out of bed to carpe more of the
diem.
But his solution didn’t involve shifting the clocks, because in 1784 standardized time
wasn’t even a thing, so instead he called for cannons and church bells at sunrise.
Much like the turkey as America’s national bird, this Franklin idea did not catch on,
but his goal was the same as every daylight saving time crusader who came after him: Change
the hours of human activity to make the best use of daylight.
Before the mid-1800s having a bunch of different local times wasn’t a huge problem because
it took days to go visit anyone anyway, but once railroads started chugging suddenly everyone
needed to agree what time it was or no one would get anywhere.
"Doc!"
"Marty!"
By 1872 railroads had declared over 70 different official times in the U.S. alone, so in 1884
President Chester A. Arthur hosted a convention where dozens of countries agreed Greenwich,
England gets to be zero degrees longitude and everyone established official time zones
based on that.
Except for France and Ireland, who hated the British and used their own official time 9
and 25 minutes different from Greenwich, respectively, until the 19-teens.
In 1905 a New Zealand post office clerk named George Hudson originated the modern idea of
moving the clocks twice a year because he secretly wanted more time to collect bugs
after work, but the idea really took off a few years later on a different set of islands,
when William Willett, an English architect, went out for a morning horse ride and got
sad because his sleepyhead countrymen were wasting a bunch of fine British daylight.
Willett also secretly wanted more time to play golf after work, and he published a pamphlet
calling for a summer clock shift, promising more time to exercise, work, and enjoy the
daylight; cleaner skies from burning less coal; boosts in health and happiness from
breathing less of said coal smoke, and allegedly better eyesight.
He calculated that an hour clock shift would add three years more daylight to your life
by age 72.
According to Willett, people already wound their watches hundreds of times per year so
changing what time it was should be no big deal?
But people were like “Uhh we just got everyone on the same time a few years ago and now you
want to go mess it up?” so Willett died in 1915 without Daylight Saving Time becoming
law.
Today he’s buried under a sundial set to Daylight Saving Time with a Latin inscription
saying “I only count the sunny hours”
Because Willett’s Daylight Saving movement did finally start to catch on… in Germany,
during World War I.
See, the Germans, along with allies on their side of the trenches, sprang the summer clocks
forward to save energy for the war effort, and Britain and the rest of Europe weren’t
going to let the Germans have that advantage, so they all enacted Willett’s time, only
to immediately get rid of it when the war ended in 1918.
All this time, scientists knew moving numbers around on a clock doesn’t actually save
time, so they just followed Greenwich.
But meanwhile over in the US, “Daylight Clubs” had started springing up, and lobbying
from manufacturing tycoons, labor unions, and even baseball teams convinced President
Woodrow Wilson to make Daylight Saving Time federal law.
As a child, you might have heard, like I did, that Daylight Saving Time is for farmers.
That’s a lie.
Farmers hated the idea from the beginning, because the rooster still crows at sunrise
and cows need milking no matter what time the clock says.
American farmers hated it so much that rural congresspeople got Daylight Saving Time overturned
almost immediately.
The next few decades were a huge mess.
Some cities and states followed their own time-changing laws and some didn’t, with
only 1 in 4 Americans observing Daylight Saving Time in the 1930s.
And over in Europe, Germany had gotten rid of it after the Great War, while the UK kept
it, and France being France did both.
Confused yet?
You’re on the right track.
World War II brought Daylight Saving back again, but only temporarily, and in the US,
the every town for itself policy continued until, in 1964, Daylight Saving Time began
on these dates and ended on these dates depending on where you lived.
Trains, planes, automobile drivers, and broadcasters had had enough.
Finally, in 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed Daylight Saving Time into law for the
whole country.
Importantly, states are allowed to exempt themselves and stay on standard time – like
Arizona and Hawaii do – but more on this law later.
Over in Europe, the 1970s energy crisis brought daylight saving back, except for the UK who
had never changed, and the EU made it the official rule in 1996 nearly a century after
it was first devised.
This incredibly messy history was apparently all necessary because daylight saving time
supposedly comes with a ton of advantages.
Supposedly.
From World War I onward, saving energy by using daylight instead of artificial light
for more of our waking hours has been one the main justifications.
While that may be true in some places, summer energy use actually goes up in others.
Modern bulbs just don’t suck as much electricity anymore, and while people have turned off
some lights, they’ve turned on lots of air conditioners, computers, and TVs.
Even in places where it does save energy, the effect is only a few dollars per household.
If it’s not really about energy, what is it about?
Maybe money.
Fast food restaurants and many retail businesses originally got behind DST because they realized
it meant more sales of burgers and ice cream and everything else.
And since increased sales at McDonald’s, for example, leads to a greater demand for
Kansas beef and Idaho potatoes, retail owners became a powerful national political movement
supporting not just the existence of but even expanding DST.
These days in the US it covers two-thirds of the calendar year, with the extra month
of evening light bringing in half a billion dollars for the golf industry alone.
But changing the hours of human activity to make the best use of daylight does have some
real non-capitalism-related advantages.
People do spend more time outside, which for those of you who never try it, I can assure
you is pretty nice.
More evening light also leads to fewer fatal motor vehicle accidents.
And while more artificial light in dark places often doesn’t reduce crime, adding more
daylight to the evening actually does reduce crime.
It’s the time changing that causes problems.
It’s like voluntary jetlag.
Literally NO ONE likes jetlag!
Why would we do it to ourselves by choice?!
Shifting the clock, whether it’s forward or back, messes with our circadian rhythms,
the natural chemical and cellular cycles that control when we’re awake, which messes with
the duration and quality of our sleep, and being sleepy screws us up in a bunch of different
ways:
Sleep deprivation and sleep disruption in the days after time changes leads to: More
traffic accidents, more workplace injuries, people spend more time than usual on the internet
at work, it messes up how we make decisions and can even lower stock market returns, judges
give harsher punishments, people feel more depressed when they fall back in the autumn,
and the end of DST even leads to more people hitting wildlife with their cars.
Think of the animals, people!
Major disasters, including the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez oil spill,
and the Challenger space shuttle disaster have been at least partly linked to insufficient
sleep and disrupted circadian rhythms.
All this changing back and forth, messing with our brains and our sanity, is a problem.
The solution?
So glad you asked because I have a pamphlet of my own.
Take it.
Permanent daylight saving time could be the best solution.
Set the clocks forward in the spring, get the extra daylight when Earth is tilting that
way, and just leave it.
Except, here in the US at least, we can’t, because of how the federal law about daylight
saving time was written.
States can only opt out of daylight saving time, they can’t opt out of standard time
to have daylight saving time year-round, not without a change to federal law.
In 2019, around half the states had considered bills like this, but as of today in the US
it’s literally illegal to make daylight saving time permanent.
If you think I'm kidding, I’m not.
But many scientists who study our natural biological rhythms think we should do the
opposite, and stay on permanent Standard Time.
Our body's biological clock might be set by the sun, but our “social clock” is set
by the rules that we make–going to school, to work, etc.
Getting up when it's dark to keep up with social time is tough.
And it’s hard to go to bed earlier if the sun’s still out.
You can end up with what's called a "social jetlag," which has been linked to physical
and mental health problems.
According to these researchers, during Daylight Saving Time, this social jetlag is worse.
They say permanent standard time would put our sun clock more in sync with the clock
we all follow to be functional members of society.
But whatever solution you prefer, this biannual clock switching needs to go.
"It's time to stop!
It's time to stop okay?
No more!"
EU countries seem to get it, and have voted to get rid of the time-switching starting
in 2021.
But European countries will get to decide whether to stay on their standard winter time
or summer time, and thanks to Brexit the UK’s clocks will be doing their own thing.
We’re sorta right back where we were a hundred years ago, with nice orderly time zones full
of countries changing the clocks whenever they feel like it.
Now maybe that won’t be too big a problem.
Most of our time-keeping devices are automatically updated these days, but they rely on other
computers to tell them it is, and it’s only a matter of time with a jumbled system like
this until something goes wrong in some computer somewhere.
I just hope it’s an Xbox and not a nuclear power plant.
This whole thing got started because most of the world’s most powerful countries a
hundred years ago just happened to be at latitudes with long summer days and darker winters.
But in a lot of the world this just makes no sense, especially near the equator, where
daylight doesn’t really change from day to day.
Perhaps, for the good of the vast majority of people on Earth who already realize this
clock switching is a silly idea, we should truly seize the day and get ourselves to permanent
DST ASAP.
If you’ve seen my video about the invention of the metric system, you know that the best
intentions, executed poorly, can mess up history and science in some significant and unexpected
ways.
And this is another good reminder that the universe is a messy place that doesn’t follow
human rules or always fit into our nice neat organizational bins.
Trust me, bending time to your will just doesn’t work.
We’ll be much better off changing ourselves to make the most of our time.
Stay curious.
[MUSIC]
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