With everyone else in the United States, I moved my clock back an hour yesterday morning to end Daylight Saving Time for the year. Most of us go about that ritual without questioning it, like brushing our teeth before bed. Like it’s part of the natural order of the world.
It turns out that the guy who first conceived of Daylight Saving Time (DST) was a British born insect researcher and astronomer named George Vernon Hudson.
In 1881, at the age of 14, Hudson moved with his family to New Zealand. For most of his career, Hudson worked at a post office in Wellington, but he also had time to go off on magnetic and biological surveys. And on excursions to collect insects, especially in the summer months. Hudson reasoned that if clocks were set ahead two hours in the summer, he would have more daylight hours to round up his bugs. On October 15, 1895, he proposed the idea to the Wellington Philosophical Society, explaining that:
The effect of this alteration would be to advance all the day’s operations in summer two hours compared with the present system. In this way the early-morning daylight would be utilised, and a long period of daylight leisure would be made available in the evening for cricket, gardening, cycling, or any other outdoor pursuit desired.
The Society rejected Hudson’s idea. According to the minutes of that meeting, one Mr. Haskell responded that “the mere calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time. It was out of the question to think of altering a system that had been in use for thousands of years, and found by experience to be the best.”
The concept of Daylight Saving Time was resurrected in 1916, when Germany instituted the plan to conserve fuel. (More daylight in the evening would require less electricity for lights, etc). With the Standard Time Act of March 19, 1918, the scheme was first adopted by the United States. After the War, Congress abolished the Act, and DST became a local option. Some states used it, some did not. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 again mandated DST, but again allowed individual states to opt out. As of today, all states observe DST except Arizona and Hawaii.
Daylight Saving Time is, of course, a humanmade construction. Regardless of how we set our clocks, there are 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year. Sixty minutes to the hour and sixty seconds to a minute. But are those units of time also human constructions? Yes and no.
Accidents of astronomy play a critical role in our calendars. Let’s start with the most obvious unit of time, the day. The length of the day is determined by the time it takes our planet to rotate once on its axis. But there are other planets with very different lengths of the day: Jupiter has a rotation period of a mere 9.8 Earth hours, while Venus sluggishly makes one complete turn on its axis every 243 Earth days. The length of the day on each planet results from the spinning rate of the particular random patch of gas and material that formed the planet billions of years ago.
What about the length of the hour? Why are there 24 hours in day? In other words, why do we divide the day into 24 parts? Because there are 12 lunar cycles in a year. Twelve parts for daylight and 12 parts for night give 24 parts. And why are there 12 lunar cycles in a year? Another complete cosmic accident. The moon is at such a distance from the earth that it makes one orbit of the earth in approximately 1/12 the time it takes the earth to go around the Sun. But that is an accident, unique to Earth. Saturn’s largest moon, Phobos, circles that planet in a mere 8 hours, while it takes Saturn 29 Earth years to go around the Sun. So for Saturn, there are 31,755 lunar cycles in one Saturn year, as opposed to 12 on Earth.
And why is the hour divided into 60 minutes and each minute divided into 60 seconds? Anthropologists tell us that the ancient Sumerians, in 2000 BC, developed a number system based on 60. Although there are probably several reasons why these ancient peoples arranged their counting around 60, scholars believe that a principal reason is that 60 can be divided by a great host of smaller numbers: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30, thus making it especially useful for measuring out fractions of goods in the marketplace.
Finally, we come to the all-important year, which regulates the growing seasons and thus the rhythms of all life on the planet. The year is the time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun, another cosmic accident. We know that just in our own solar system, planets have a wide range of orbital periods about the Sun, ranging from 88 Earth days for Mercury to 165 Earth years for Neptune. (For those of you older than 16, Pluto was demoted as a planet in 2006.) If we look elsewhere in the universe, we find an even greater range for the orbital periods of planets about their central stars. The record holder for the shortest “year” is the planet Kepler 78b, at a distance of about 400 light years from Earth.
Kepler 78b whips around its central star in 8.5 Earth hours. Life would be exciting for creatures on Kepler 78b, if it were not for its temperature, 3680 degrees.
In sum, many of our units of time, which we accept without thinking, are cosmic accidents involving the particular (and random) spin rate of our planet and the particular (and random) distance of our moon from our planet and the particular (and random) distance of Earth from the Sun. These units of time are not fundamental and inviolable constants of the world. They are accidents of nature, results of chance events that happened in a particular place at a particular time.
There are other accidents that we accept without question. For example, why is our number system based on 10? In other worlds, why do we count with 10s? Almost certainly because we have 10 fingers. And why is that? When our ancestors groped their way from sea to land, there would certainly have been an evolutionary advantage to having several claws, to grip the earth and slower-moving animals. But chance probably played a role. We might have done just as well with 4 or 6 fingers on each hand as with 5. In which case our number system might have been based on 8 or 12 rather than 10.
Now that my mind is spinning like Jupiter . . . There are so many things we accept without questioning – things that we attribute without thinking to the natural order of the world. When, in fact, they arise from happenstance or tradition. Racism for instance.
I grew up in Memphis, in the 1950s and early 1960s. Almost every middle class white family in the South could afford to have a black maid work for them. Our maid was named Blanche Lee. My brothers and I dearly loved Blanche. She always talked to us sweetly and comforted us when we were upset. My mother, who grew up in New Orleans, was well educated and liberal in almost all respects, but she took the superiority of white skin as a given. And for me, living in that household as a child and surrounded by adults who thought the same as my mother, it took many years to understand that the superiority claimed by my mother was not a given of the natural order of things.
Blanche worked long hours, at least 60 hours per week. She arrived at our house around 7am and left at 7 or 8pm, after cleaning the dinner dishes. In 1960, she was paid $30 per week, about half the minimum wage. Blanche’s duties covered everything from cleaning the toilets to washing clothes to ironing shirts to cooking meals. She swept the floors, made the beds, sewed pants that were ripped, polished the silver, picked up the toys, fed the dog, dusted the hundreds of books on our bookshelves. Several times a week, my mother sent Blanche off to the grocery store with a shopping list. Blanche’s reading ability was limited. Almost always, she would come home missing a few items on the list, at which point Mother would run around in a flutter, wag her finger at Blanche and say “Blanche, when are you going to learn how to read English?”
A swinging door separated the kitchen from the dining room. In the evenings, while my parents and brothers and I sat eating at the table in the dining room, Blanche ate her own dinner at a small table in the kitchen, ten feet away, behind the closed door. That was the order of the world. The unspoken rule was that Blanche should never watch us as we ate, because that would make her like a guest at the table. When my mother wanted something, she rang a small brass bell. Blanche would come hurrying through the swinging door, ready to serve another helping of mashed potatoes or fill up the glasses with more ice tea. Years later, after both Blanche and my mother had passed away, I inherited that brass bell. Its handle consists of the figure of an old woman sitting with her legs crossed, wearing a supplicant’s cloak and holding out her hand for alms. In my youth, the sound of that bell was pure music. Now, it cuts like a knife.
As a natural born rebel ( or something) I have always questioned changing clocks and the policies and hypocrisies of the country.
Thank you for posting, for your voice of intelligent and gentle reason. You bring relief in this stressed out time.
Good article! We are linking to this particularly great article on our site. Keep up the great writing. Hettie Ewan Huxley
Thank you Hettie. The best way to contact me is at lightmanalan@aol.com
There is visibly a bundle to identify about this. I consider you made some good points in features also. Brittni Gaspar Deb
Thank you Brittni
This is a beautiful writeup on one aspect of life which is usually hidden from the public eye. Lindi Stephanus Nash
Thank you Lindi. I am a bit late replying.
I love it when folks get together and share ideas. Great website, keep it up. Marley Barn Nichani
Thank you Marley. Sorry I am late replying.
Excellent post. I will be experiencing a few of thee issues as well.. Aleece Fields Molloy
Thank you Allece. Sorry I am late replying.
I visit every day some websites aand information siutes tto read posts, however this blog gives feature based content. Tanya Gaspar Derick