Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - What's the Deal With Daylight Savings?

Episode Date: March 14, 2021

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? Is there a good reason for it? Should we continue to do it? Learn more about the history and future of Daylight Savings Time on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 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 Thulein podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Everything Everywhere tours. Yep, that's right. I've done dozens of episodes now talking about interesting people, places, and things. Wouldn't you like to see some of these things yourself?

That's why I'm going to start offering my listeners the ability to see some of the most historic cities in the world in a way which few people ever get to see them. Obviously, there are issues with traveling right now. So stay tuned at the end of the show for more information about the tours and what I'm planning. 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. During the warmer months, you advance your clocks ahead by one hour to take advantage of the extra daylight and 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 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 cities 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 of 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 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 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 associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson.

I've traveled a lot in my life, and I've been on quite a few tours with tour groups. The way they normally work is you spend a few days in one city and then go to the next city and so on. There's nothing wrong with this, but I've been thinking of what I could offer that would be really different. In the course of researching, many of the episodes I've done, I keep coming across interesting things. Many times in cities I've already visited, I made a mental list of all the things to see the next time I go back and eventually it dawned on me that other people would like to see these things too. For example, in Rome, most people see the Coliseum and the Forum, the Trevi Fountain, and the Vatican. There might be a few other things, but they hit the highlights and then they move on.

However, few people ever bothered to visit Ostia Antica, the old port city of Rome, or Hadrian's villa just outside of town in the hills, or the necropolis under the main altar of the Vatican where they found the bones of St. Peter. Or Nero's Palace, or the catacombs around Rome, or the 2,000-year-old sewers under Rome that are still functioning. Basically, I'm proposing an incredibly deep dive into the history of a single city. Unpack your bags once at a hotel and get tours of these places with genuine experts, with PhDs in their fields, archaeology, history, and art. This would be a tour for true geeks who love culture, art, and history. So far, I've identified three cities that I think

would be great candidates for this type of tour, Rome, Istanbul, and Jerusalem. The tours will be quite small, only 8 to 10 people maximum. If there's more demand, I'll just do a second tour and do them back to back. Obviously, given conditions around the world right now, it would be impossible to set dates for a tour. And without date, you can't set a price, and nobody can commit to anything without that. But if this is something you think you might be interested in, go to everything-everywhere.com slash tour and just leave your email address. I'll notify you when I know more information and conditions are such that it's possible to

actually commit to a date. And before warned, this might not actually happen until 2022. Once again, go to everything dash everywhere.com slash tour. And you can also click on a link in the show notes.