Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Daylight Savings (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. Every year around this time, people who live in northern latitude countries turn their clocks ahead one hour. Then, months later, we do the exact same thing in reverse setting all of our clocks back. Why do we do this? And is there a good reason for it? And should we continue to do it? Learn more about the history and future of daylight savings time on this episode of

Starting point is 00:00:27 Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. I've done episodes in the past on the history of timekeeping and on time zones, both of which brushed against the subject of daylight savings time, but didn't really deal with it directly. For those of you who might live in an area that don't use this practice, it's actually pretty simple.

Starting point is 00:01:25 During the warmer months, you advance your clocks ahead by one hour to take advantage of the extra daylight in the evenings. When it gets colder and the days are shorter, you move your clocks back one hour. If you live somewhere which is close to the equator, there really isn't much need for it because the length of your days doesn't change that much throughout the year. If you live in an extreme northern latitude, it also doesn't matter too much because your days are so extreme. Winter is mostly all dark and summers are mostly all light. Changing the clock doesn't really matter. For people whose day follow the sun, like a farmer, it also doesn't really matter, because if you have to milk the cows at sunrise, it doesn't really matter what time sunrise is. So, why do we do this then? What's the benefit? Many people say that the originator of daylight savings was Benjamin Franklin. This, however, is not quite true. What he did do was lampoon the French and suggested that they wake up earlier so they could save money.

Starting point is 00:02:17 money on candles by not staying up so late at night. There were recorded examples of groups in Spain that would change the time of meetings in the summer to take advantage of daylight, but they weren't changing clocks. They just changed the time when the meetings took place. There really wasn't even a need for adjusting clocks for most of human history, because we didn't have accurate clocks to begin with, and very little was dependent on clock time as opposed to sun time. This changed with the development of railroads. You can listen to my previous episode about time zones, but suddenly city's These far apart from each other needed to be on the same time, and being punctual became a bigger issue. As the world became electrified and industrialized, energy became an issue. People began

Starting point is 00:02:59 using artificial lighting in the evening, and that used power. In the early 20th century, lighting was a large percentage of all the electricity consumed. The idea was hatched that if we were to adjust the clocks in the summer, people could use daylight for another hour in the evening, and that would mean an hour less of artificial lighting. It should be noted here, there wasn't any data to support this hypothesis. It was just a good idea. The first person who proposed an actual daylight savings time was New Zealand entomologist George Hudson. And that's entomologist as in someone who studies bugs. He proposed a two-hour plan which would allow him to collect more bugs after work. The first place to ever adopt a daylight savings program

Starting point is 00:03:42 were the towns of Port Arthur and Fort William, Ontario in 1908. Today, they are collectively known as the city of Thunder Bay. The first country to formally adopt a daylight savings plan was Germany in 1916. During World War I, they had to conserve resources for the war effort, so they adopted daylight savings in an attempt to do that. Within a year, most of the other countries in Europe, on both sides of the conflict, had adopted daylight savings. In 1918, the United States adopted it for the first time as well.

Starting point is 00:04:12 Daylight Savings was abandoned in the U.S. as soon as the war ended. It was very unpopular with farmers who didn't have jobs that were dependent upon the clock, but rather the sun. In 1919, a big part of the United States was still rural and worked in agriculture. Daylight savings was brought back to the U.S. in 1942 during World War II. President Roosevelt simply called it wartime. After the war, everything in the U.S. was kind of in chaos because every locality was deciding whether or not to observe daylight safety. savings. In 1966, the federal government stepped in to solve the confusion. They passed the Uniform Time Act, which stipulated that states could do whatever they wanted, but the whole state

Starting point is 00:04:54 either had to observe daylight savings as a unit. The act also set the timing of daylight savings, so everyone was on the same page. It would begin on the first Sunday of April and end on the last Sunday of October. Notably, there were a few states which didn't adopt daylight savings. Hawaii never did for pretty obvious reasons. It was close enough to the equator that there was little benefit to adopting it. Arizona and Indiana didn't adopt daylight savings either, although Indiana finally adopted it in 2006, and Arizona is still a holdout. In Canada, Saskatchewan stopped observing daylight savings time in 1961 and still doesn't do it to this day. In 2007, the United States expanded the length of daylight savings by a month, starting two weeks earlier

Starting point is 00:05:40 and ending two weeks later. And that's the schedule we still have today. Today, most countries that use daylight savings are in Europe or North America, with a handful in the Middle East. There are only four countries in the Southern Hemisphere that have adopted daylight savings, New Zealand, Paraguay, Chile, and the southernmost states of Australia. But let's go back to the original intent of daylight savings. It was supposed to conserve energy. Does it actually do that? As I noted before, the idea behind the idea behind the Daylight Savings was just that. It was an idea. It seemed like it made sense. There really wasn't any hard data to support the fact that it worked. Well, the data has now started to come in, and the data

Starting point is 00:06:21 is not looking too good for daylight savings. One paper analyzed energy consumption in Indiana after they adopted daylight savings. They found energy consumption actually increased by 1%. Artificial lighting may have gone down, but air conditioning usage went up. Other studies have shown a market. could increase in suicides, strokes, heart attacks, workplace injuries, car crashes, and emergency room visits when daylight savings starts in March. There's even evidence that judges hand down harsher sentences. Oddly enough, similar effects have not been found when daylight savings ends in October or November. Basically, you have hundreds of millions of people who are all simultaneously suffering from a very mild case of jet lag. So maybe we should get rid of

Starting point is 00:07:10 daylight savings, right? The problem is there is no consensus as to what we should do. A 2009 survey conducted by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center showed that opinions were really split on what should be done. 40% of the people didn't want daylight savings at all and thought we should just keep standard time year round. 31% of those surveyed thought we should keep daylight savings all the time, and 28% just wanted to keep the status quo. So basically, anything we do do is going to anger most of the people. The funny thing is, the Gallup organization has been polling Americans on this subject since 1943, and there has never been a majority of people who supported daylight savings. The biggest problem with daylight savings seems not to be which

Starting point is 00:07:56 time we pick, but the fact that we have to change time every year. In 2020, the Yukon territory in Canada sprung their clocks ahead one hour in March, and then they never turned back. They're now on permanent daylight savings, or they're just in plain old mountain standard time. As of right now, there isn't any plan to do anything about daylight savings one way or another. So it seems that daylight savings time will be one of those things like getting rid of the penny. Everyone agrees something should be done, but nothing probably ever will. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiever.

Starting point is 00:08:38 I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. your support helps me put out a new show every day. And if you're interested in everything everywhere daily merchandise, Patreon is currently the only place where it's available. And if you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and get notified of future episodes and projects, please join my Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Daylight Savings (Encore)

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