![Why Do We Spring Forward? [from American History Hotline]](https://cdn-images-3.listennotes.com/podcasts/newtons-law/why-do-we-spring-forward-KcPnx3F72vJ-NirkIh4aqJy.1400x1400.jpg "Why Do We Spring Forward? [from American History Hotline]")
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Speaker 1: Hey, they are American History Hotliners. Are you ready to spring forward this weekend?
00:00:05
Speaker 2: Yeah?
00:00:05
Speaker 1: Me, neither. It turns out most Americans don't like daylight savings time, losing sleep, waking up in the dark, having a confused dog, pauling at his dish. But there are actually some good reasons we keep it around. Would are they? Well, here's my conversation with Chad Orzel about some of the reasons daylight saving time persists and how it got started in the first place. Hope you enjoy You've reached American History Hotline. You asked the questions, we get the answers. Leave a message, all right, Chad. Our question comes from Donna in Stockton, California. She wants to know why the heck do we still have daylight saving time and why can't we get rid of it?
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Speaker 2: So the question of daylight saving time is really it's a question of priorities, right. There are two things that daylight saving time accomplishes. One is it ensures that the sun rises relatively early in the winter, so it's not sunrise at nine am, as it would be in my area if we were on daylight saving year round. And it also ensures that the sun is up late in the summer, so you have those nice long summer evenings, you know, where you can go to a baseball game and it's light out until, you know, after nine o'clock. And we like both of those things. We like having both of those, and we would lose those if we went we could only keep one of those if we went to a system where we're either daylight saving year round or standard time year round. So it's kind of the best way to balance those two things that we like having.
00:01:56
Speaker 1: So take us back before this right before and dies time in time zones? What did people do?
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Speaker 2: So the oldest forms of timekeeping all rely on the position of the sun in the sky, right you say, you know, the sun comes up in the east ish and it sets in the west Ish, and it moves across the sky over the course of the day, and you can keep track of the time by roughly where it is. If you want to be a little more precise, you can, you know, put a stick in the ground and some markings and make yourself a sun dial, and everybody just sort of associated. You know, noon is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. It's due south. If you're in the northern hemisphere, and so you can identify that point and call that noon. That varies from place to place as you move around the earth. So as you move from east to west, the sun will appear either higher in the sky or lower in the sky at the same instant, and so the time of noon is different in different locations. Now, that doesn't matter if the fastest transportation you have is you know, getting a guy on a horse or or a ship sailing on the on the ocean, because you're never going to move far enough for it to make a significant difference. But once you start to get things like trains and then you know fast boats and airplanes, then it starts to matter a lot.
00:03:24
Speaker 1: And is that when it came into standardization, like at the advent of the of the railroad.
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Speaker 2: It's the advent of the railroads. And also the telegraph is a really big thing because that lets you send messages instantaneously over enormous distances, and you know, suddenly you can be in New York City and you know, sending a telegram to somebody in San Francisco and getting a response back in minutes or hours rather than you know, taking three months to get there. And back, So then it really starts to matter that, you know, the sun is much lower in the sky in San Francisco that it is in New York, So.
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Speaker 1: I'm thinking the eighteen thirties.
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Speaker 2: A little later than that, eighteen fifties is when it starts to really become an issue. By the mid eighteen hundreds, the railroads are kind of standardizing things on their own. Right, any individual railroad company owns many miles of track, They string telegraph cables along those tracks and they use them to sync up all of their own clocks, so they're pretty well pretty well locked in the you know, it's around in the eighteen fifties the rail companies sort of start to agree to synchronize their schedules with each other, so they're taking a smallish number of local times, but most municipalities still sort of kept track of their own. You know, noon is when the sun is highest in the sky, and then there's railroad time, which is you need to know if you're going to get on a train here.
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Speaker 1: So it really didn't matter at that point if it's twelve fifteen in Charlotte, North Carolina and twelve forty seven in Philadelphia.
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Speaker 2: Right, it didn't make that much difference. You know, it's a handful of minutes most places that you would travel over the course of a day, or you know, it's maybe like half an hour if you take a really long ride and arrive in a distant location. So you know, it's not that big a deal for most people, and people just kind of rolled with it.
00:05:32
Speaker 1: So what about time zones? Did they when did they come into standardization?
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Speaker 2: So this all happens in the eighteen seventies into early eighteen eighties, and it starts with a guy named Cleveland Abbey who was one of the first weather forecasters. He's at the forerunner of the National Weather Service, and he was trying to coordinate weather observations across a huge area of the country and also the most dramatic event was an Aurora borealis that happened in eighteen seventy four, and he was trying to link up measurements of many observers in many different locations were recording their observations. He was trying to piece it all together, and he found it it was a miserable mess because people had, you know, written down the time according to their local clock, and other people were on railroad time, and people were you know, scattered all over and putting it all together was a real mess. So he started to lobby for establishing some sort of standardization of time, and you know, pitched the idea of we should just divide the country up into chunks and have them all agree to be the same time.
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Speaker 1: Pitched it to.
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Speaker 2: He started with a group called the American Metrological Society that didn't actually do very much. They were at Columbia and so their response was the classic academic response, so just creating a committee and making him the chair of it. But he was a civil servant, so he knew how to deal with that, and he responded by reaching out to people who had actual power, which included both the government and the railroads. So there's a trade organization that was the General Time Convention of Railroad Officials, which coordinated schedules of rail lines all across the country. And he got in touch with the guy who ran that and brought the idea to him, fellow named William Allen, And he had a counterpart in Canada named Sandford Fleming who was thinking along similar lines. And the two of them got with the railroads and said Alan very explicitly pitched it to the railroads as, look, if we don't do something, Congress is going to get involved, and we're not going to like whatever Congress comes up with, So we should just impose our own system of time zones and then and then everybody else will go along. And that's in fact what happened. They drew up a set of time zones based on where there were boundaries between collections of railroad companies. It turns out to be pretty close to the Eastern, Central, Mountain, Western zones that we have now. And they just said, you know, all of the railroad companies agreed to adopt this system, and then they lobbied local municipalities to sign on to their time scheme, and that ended up becoming the backbone of standardized time zones in the US.
00:08:37
Speaker 1: And so the idea that the Easter time zone is an hour different from Central, and Mountain is two hour different from East, and Pacific is three hour different from East, that was just kind of a you know, it's not to the minute, but it was an estimation.
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Speaker 2: Right, and and what works out nicely, you know there the width of those zone is approximately one hour in difference in the position of the sun and the sky, so that that works out pretty pretty nicely. And you know, everybody in the zone had to change their clocks a little bit, so they they He was really savvy with this this plan. Se he fixed the time based on the observatory in Greenwich, England, right yeah, and which hadn't yet been fully established, but he tied it to that because that meant that that literally every city, every major city, had to change their clocks by a few minutes. So nobody it wasn't like Washington, d c. Was being forced to adopt New York City time, or you know, Atlanta was being forced to adopt Boston time. Everybody had to change the clocks by a little bit, and so it was easier to put over on the on the big cities.
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Speaker 1: Chad, do you ever think to yourself that there's no way that we could come up with this again these days?
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Speaker 2: It would be hard to get everybody to sign on to these these days, particularly since you've got you know, if you look at sort of eastern Maine to western Indiana, that's like it's like an hour and ten minutes actual difference if you were going by the position of the sun, and so it's you know, for those people at those edges of those boundaries, it's not a it's not a small difference in the length of your day.
00:10:30
Speaker 1: So daylight saving time when does that enter the chat?
00:10:36
Speaker 2: Daylight saving time comes about starts in Europe around World War One, and it's basically as the name suggests, it's a way to avoid having to burn energy to generate light, right, So they don't want to have to burn coal to generate electricity to power lights, so they just make they shift the clocks so it's daylight long longer, and then people don't need to turn the lights on, and then they can save coal for the war effort. That starts during World War One gets pretty universally adopted by the combatants, including the US when we get into it, and then after the war kind of gets a little loose for a while, and then in World War Two everybody again does this shift of clocks in the summertime to make it light longer so that you're not using coal and oil that could go to the war effort. And then after World War Two it sticks around much more, you know, observed a little intermittently, but you know, by the nineteen sixties they decide to you know, we really need to formalize this. In the mid sixties, they pass a Uniform Time Act that defines, Okay, we're going to have these time zones. These are the approximate boundaries and sets up some rules for those states on the edges as to you know, what can you do in terms of coming in coming out of time zones and that sort of thing.
00:12:07
Speaker 1: Let's talk about Arizona. Okay, anytime I travel there and it's daylight saving time, I get messed up. What's up with Arizona.
00:12:18
Speaker 2: So, Arizona is one of the last holdouts in not participating in the time switch, and their argument is actually energy based as well. The origin of daylight savings is trying not to spend fuel that could go to other purposes on generating artificial light. Arizona's argument these days is, look, it's really hot here, and so if people are awake, you know, longer during daylight hours, that's more time that it's really hot, and you know, we have to do air conditioning and things like that. Our people are just miserable. So you know, it doesn't save us any energy to move the clocks later in the summer. We actually want it to get dark earlier in Arizona so that the temperature goes down and things are more pleasant.
00:13:12
Speaker 1: Uh.
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Speaker 2: The other big one that that doesn't participate is Hawaii, which uh, you know, doesn't directly border anything else. And also they're far enough in the tropics that the change in the length of the day isn't that great to begin with, so it doesn't make as much of a difference if they push daylight back and forth. So so Hawaii for a long time, doesn't it.
00:13:34
Speaker 1: Is Hawaiian Pacific time zone, or that they have a whole they're their own time zone. They have their own time zone.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I think they're they're five hours off East Coast time.
00:13:43
Speaker 1: So and and just to make this another of us, the Navajo Nation within Arizona does not observe daylight saving time, right.
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Speaker 2: And there's there's been, you know, for a long time some counties in Indiana that that stay with the they go with the central zone because even though the boundary is supposed to be a state boundary, most of the people there work in Chicago or in in Springfield, and so that they you know, they go with the Illinois time because that's where most of the people are are working.
00:14:17
Speaker 1: I gotta say, I travel a lot, and I travel west a lot. And every time we hit Central Tennessee, not Oakridge, Tennessee, near there, and you get that extra hour, you really feel like you're beating time, you know, like you're really getting something in your pocket. I got.
00:14:36
Speaker 2: I got myself in trouble one time because I was going from Georgia to Alabama to give a talk and you know, spending a leisurely morning, and then I realized very belatedly that there was a time change involved. I guess it was the other way. I was started in Alabama and I was going to Georgia, and then I was like, oh crap, it's like a different time zone. Like I have an hour less to get there than I think I do.
00:15:03
Speaker 1: So so we got Hawaii, We've got Arizona, we've got parts of Indiana, any other states not observed.
00:15:13
Speaker 2: It changes fairly frequently. I don't know what the current status is. I think that's it at the moment.
00:15:21
Speaker 1: Well, if you ask any politician and they have nothing else to talk about, they're going to tell you they want to get rid of it.
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Speaker 2: Sometimes if they have other things that they could be talking about, and they want to not to be talking about them.
00:15:34
Speaker 1: I think I think you're actually more accurate on that.
00:15:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, the issue there is, you know, everybody says they hate it because it's inconvenient, like twice a year, right, so you know there's those two days where you have to reset all the clocks in your house, and you know that's that's awkward. But as I said at the beginning, it gets us two things that we like. We tried in the early nineteen seventies during the oil crunch, there was a law passed to actually go to year round daylight saving time and took effect in January, and by October when the time to roll the clocks back came around, by then they had within ten months they had repealed the law. And we've moved the clocks back again. And the reason is without if you stay on the daylight saving time that we use in the summer, then sunrise in a lot of East Coast cities in December is like nine in the morning, right, and so you know, children waiting for the bus, the sun isn't up yet, and people hate that even more than they hate resetting their clocks. And so we went back to the system of springing forward and falling back. You know, the real disruptive one is the spring where you have to move the clocks forward, because everybody loses an hour of sleep there, and that's kind of nobody. Nobody likes that. The fall one people don't mind so much because you know, there's one weekend a year when you get an extra hour of sleep, and that's kind of nice.
00:17:11
Speaker 1: It messes the kids up, though, the.
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Speaker 2: Kids and dogs. The dog is outraged every November. We know, why is my breakfast an hour late?
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Speaker 1: Right? And our kids it just seems to be and you you talk to the teachers at school, and it is. It's school. It really ex younger children.
00:17:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, my joke solution to this problem is that we should we should keep the fall back one. We should keep that one weekend a year where everybody gets an extra hour of sleep, but we should get rid of the spring forward and instead, starting at the winter solstice December twenty first, give or take every weekend, move forward five minutes for twelve and that gets you back to an hour forward in the middle of March, right, and and that you know, five minutes a weekend. Nobody would notice that, and you know your the clock in my car is off by five minutes already, so it'd be fine. It wouldn't wouldn't disrupt anything, and then you would you would smooth out that spring forward bit and still have the nice you know, Oh I get some extra sleep tonight.
00:18:24
Speaker 1: Well, Chad, most clocks these days do it themselves.
00:18:29
Speaker 2: Right, you're taking your time off. You know, if I really care what time it is, I look at my smartphone, which has the time automatically updated from from the internet. Now, every time I pitched that idea, everybody who works with computers who hears it just throws.
00:18:43
Speaker 1: Things at me.
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Speaker 2: They don't want to they know what would be involved in dealing with that.
00:18:48
Speaker 1: But well, so, Chad, there is this perception that because I remember before the last, the most recent election, it was Senator Marco Rubio who who was really on the charge along. It was a bipartisan effort, but to to get rid of daylight saving time because they people believe it's an outdated concept. But from what you're telling me, it's not an outdated concept. We still it's still applicable to our lives, even in twenty twenty five.
00:19:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's you know, as I said, it's a question of priorities and what are you what are you looking for? And I think the important thing to keep in mind is, you know, the whole system is pretty arbitrary, right. Our system of time zones relies on us pretending that it is the precise same time of day in eastern Maine and western Indiana, and that's you know, that makes no actual geographical or astronomical sense, but we do it because it's convenient. It means that, you know, except for a handful of border regions, right, you're not going to drive anywhere and have the time of day change in a way that's going to be irritating. It's really easy to coordinate activities over you know, the kind of span that you can can drive in a car in a day, and that works out pretty nicely and makes everybody's lives a lot easier. If we're already disrupting, you know, the natural order of people in eastern Maine and western Indiana enough to to you know, arbitrarily assign them the same time, it's not that much more of a disruption to have to change the clocks every now and then, and then you get those nice long summer evenings, and then it's not pitch dark when you arrive at work in December mornings, and everybody's probably happier for it.
00:20:46
Speaker 1: Looking at this from a historical perspective, daylight saving time time zones, they are part of the rise of capitalism, right they were? You know it was business who created these, right, American businesses. American industry created this.
00:21:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, I said, it's the quintess It's adopted through the quintessential American process of having large corporations lobby for it and get the system adopted that way.
00:21:18
Speaker 1: Was there anything at the stint around the same time happening in Europe? Were they asking for this? You know? Because it is? Is this an American innovation that spread worldwide?
00:21:33
Speaker 2: Now, the the Europeans were thinking along similar lines. And there's actually a major conference in the mid eighteen eighties that's that's held in Washington, d C. Where they bring together representatives of all the major world powers and talk about we should standardize times sort of globally. Most European countries had already within their own borders set up up standard time. They just made a time zone that is their own country. And then you know, there was some coordination among nations that shared borders and so on. So there was this move to standardize everything in the eighteen eighties. The big sticking point ended up being where do you put the zero? Where do you call what do you call zero? Longitude? Where you know? And then everybody references their clocks to that. And the two big contenders were Greenwich, England and Paris, France, and Paris had sort of the claim of having an older, more prestigious observatory that had been in the business longer. The British counter argument was that like seventy five percent of world shipping used maps that were made in the UK, and that ended up carrying the day. The US had, because of William Allen already sinked their clocks to something that was based on the the time in Greenwich, and so we were fine with it, and so it went along, and so the French got out voted because most people were using British nautical maps anyway, and it was just easier to go with that and use the time based on Greenwich.
00:23:18
Speaker 1: Well, Chad, where can people find your work?
00:23:22
Speaker 2: I have a substack on you know, under my own name, on a lot of things. The books are available wherever books are sold.
00:23:31
Speaker 1: I've been speaking with Chad Orzelle. He's author of the book A Brief History of Time Keeping, The science of marking time from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks. He's also an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Chad, thank you so much. It's been great.
00:23:52
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me on.
00:23:53
Speaker 1: Thank you. You've been listening to American History Holine, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show's executive producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers from iHeart are Jordan Runtall and Jason English. Original music composed by me Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our email is Americanhistory Hotline at gmail dot com. If you like the show, please tell your friends and leave us a review in Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Feel free to hit me up on social media to ask a history question or to let me know what you think of the show. You can find me at Bob Crawford Base. Thanks so much for listening. See you next week.
Speaker 1: Hey, they are American History Hotliners. Are you ready to spring forward this weekend?
00:00:05
Speaker 2: Yeah?
00:00:05
Speaker 1: Me, neither. It turns out most Americans don't like daylight savings time, losing sleep, waking up in the dark, having a confused dog, pauling at his dish. But there are actually some good reasons we keep it around. Would are they? Well, here's my conversation with Chad Orzel about some of the reasons daylight saving time persists and how it got started in the first place. Hope you enjoy You've reached American History Hotline. You asked the questions, we get the answers. Leave a message, all right, Chad. Our question comes from Donna in Stockton, California. She wants to know why the heck do we still have daylight saving time and why can't we get rid of it?
00:00:58
Speaker 2: So the question of daylight saving time is really it's a question of priorities, right. There are two things that daylight saving time accomplishes. One is it ensures that the sun rises relatively early in the winter, so it's not sunrise at nine am, as it would be in my area if we were on daylight saving year round. And it also ensures that the sun is up late in the summer, so you have those nice long summer evenings, you know, where you can go to a baseball game and it's light out until, you know, after nine o'clock. And we like both of those things. We like having both of those, and we would lose those if we went we could only keep one of those if we went to a system where we're either daylight saving year round or standard time year round. So it's kind of the best way to balance those two things that we like having.
00:01:56
Speaker 1: So take us back before this right before and dies time in time zones? What did people do?
00:02:05
Speaker 2: So the oldest forms of timekeeping all rely on the position of the sun in the sky, right you say, you know, the sun comes up in the east ish and it sets in the west Ish, and it moves across the sky over the course of the day, and you can keep track of the time by roughly where it is. If you want to be a little more precise, you can, you know, put a stick in the ground and some markings and make yourself a sun dial, and everybody just sort of associated. You know, noon is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. It's due south. If you're in the northern hemisphere, and so you can identify that point and call that noon. That varies from place to place as you move around the earth. So as you move from east to west, the sun will appear either higher in the sky or lower in the sky at the same instant, and so the time of noon is different in different locations. Now, that doesn't matter if the fastest transportation you have is you know, getting a guy on a horse or or a ship sailing on the on the ocean, because you're never going to move far enough for it to make a significant difference. But once you start to get things like trains and then you know fast boats and airplanes, then it starts to matter a lot.
00:03:24
Speaker 1: And is that when it came into standardization, like at the advent of the of the railroad.
00:03:31
Speaker 2: It's the advent of the railroads. And also the telegraph is a really big thing because that lets you send messages instantaneously over enormous distances, and you know, suddenly you can be in New York City and you know, sending a telegram to somebody in San Francisco and getting a response back in minutes or hours rather than you know, taking three months to get there. And back, So then it really starts to matter that, you know, the sun is much lower in the sky in San Francisco that it is in New York, So.
00:04:04
Speaker 1: I'm thinking the eighteen thirties.
00:04:06
Speaker 2: A little later than that, eighteen fifties is when it starts to really become an issue. By the mid eighteen hundreds, the railroads are kind of standardizing things on their own. Right, any individual railroad company owns many miles of track, They string telegraph cables along those tracks and they use them to sync up all of their own clocks, so they're pretty well pretty well locked in the you know, it's around in the eighteen fifties the rail companies sort of start to agree to synchronize their schedules with each other, so they're taking a smallish number of local times, but most municipalities still sort of kept track of their own. You know, noon is when the sun is highest in the sky, and then there's railroad time, which is you need to know if you're going to get on a train here.
00:05:02
Speaker 1: So it really didn't matter at that point if it's twelve fifteen in Charlotte, North Carolina and twelve forty seven in Philadelphia.
00:05:09
Speaker 2: Right, it didn't make that much difference. You know, it's a handful of minutes most places that you would travel over the course of a day, or you know, it's maybe like half an hour if you take a really long ride and arrive in a distant location. So you know, it's not that big a deal for most people, and people just kind of rolled with it.
00:05:32
Speaker 1: So what about time zones? Did they when did they come into standardization?
00:05:38
Speaker 2: So this all happens in the eighteen seventies into early eighteen eighties, and it starts with a guy named Cleveland Abbey who was one of the first weather forecasters. He's at the forerunner of the National Weather Service, and he was trying to coordinate weather observations across a huge area of the country and also the most dramatic event was an Aurora borealis that happened in eighteen seventy four, and he was trying to link up measurements of many observers in many different locations were recording their observations. He was trying to piece it all together, and he found it it was a miserable mess because people had, you know, written down the time according to their local clock, and other people were on railroad time, and people were you know, scattered all over and putting it all together was a real mess. So he started to lobby for establishing some sort of standardization of time, and you know, pitched the idea of we should just divide the country up into chunks and have them all agree to be the same time.
00:06:46
Speaker 1: Pitched it to.
00:06:49
Speaker 2: He started with a group called the American Metrological Society that didn't actually do very much. They were at Columbia and so their response was the classic academic response, so just creating a committee and making him the chair of it. But he was a civil servant, so he knew how to deal with that, and he responded by reaching out to people who had actual power, which included both the government and the railroads. So there's a trade organization that was the General Time Convention of Railroad Officials, which coordinated schedules of rail lines all across the country. And he got in touch with the guy who ran that and brought the idea to him, fellow named William Allen, And he had a counterpart in Canada named Sandford Fleming who was thinking along similar lines. And the two of them got with the railroads and said Alan very explicitly pitched it to the railroads as, look, if we don't do something, Congress is going to get involved, and we're not going to like whatever Congress comes up with, So we should just impose our own system of time zones and then and then everybody else will go along. And that's in fact what happened. They drew up a set of time zones based on where there were boundaries between collections of railroad companies. It turns out to be pretty close to the Eastern, Central, Mountain, Western zones that we have now. And they just said, you know, all of the railroad companies agreed to adopt this system, and then they lobbied local municipalities to sign on to their time scheme, and that ended up becoming the backbone of standardized time zones in the US.
00:08:37
Speaker 1: And so the idea that the Easter time zone is an hour different from Central, and Mountain is two hour different from East, and Pacific is three hour different from East, that was just kind of a you know, it's not to the minute, but it was an estimation.
00:08:56
Speaker 2: Right, and and what works out nicely, you know there the width of those zone is approximately one hour in difference in the position of the sun and the sky, so that that works out pretty pretty nicely. And you know, everybody in the zone had to change their clocks a little bit, so they they He was really savvy with this this plan. Se he fixed the time based on the observatory in Greenwich, England, right yeah, and which hadn't yet been fully established, but he tied it to that because that meant that that literally every city, every major city, had to change their clocks by a few minutes. So nobody it wasn't like Washington, d c. Was being forced to adopt New York City time, or you know, Atlanta was being forced to adopt Boston time. Everybody had to change the clocks by a little bit, and so it was easier to put over on the on the big cities.
00:09:55
Speaker 1: Chad, do you ever think to yourself that there's no way that we could come up with this again these days?
00:10:00
Speaker 2: It would be hard to get everybody to sign on to these these days, particularly since you've got you know, if you look at sort of eastern Maine to western Indiana, that's like it's like an hour and ten minutes actual difference if you were going by the position of the sun, and so it's you know, for those people at those edges of those boundaries, it's not a it's not a small difference in the length of your day.
00:10:30
Speaker 1: So daylight saving time when does that enter the chat?
00:10:36
Speaker 2: Daylight saving time comes about starts in Europe around World War One, and it's basically as the name suggests, it's a way to avoid having to burn energy to generate light, right, So they don't want to have to burn coal to generate electricity to power lights, so they just make they shift the clocks so it's daylight long longer, and then people don't need to turn the lights on, and then they can save coal for the war effort. That starts during World War One gets pretty universally adopted by the combatants, including the US when we get into it, and then after the war kind of gets a little loose for a while, and then in World War Two everybody again does this shift of clocks in the summertime to make it light longer so that you're not using coal and oil that could go to the war effort. And then after World War Two it sticks around much more, you know, observed a little intermittently, but you know, by the nineteen sixties they decide to you know, we really need to formalize this. In the mid sixties, they pass a Uniform Time Act that defines, Okay, we're going to have these time zones. These are the approximate boundaries and sets up some rules for those states on the edges as to you know, what can you do in terms of coming in coming out of time zones and that sort of thing.
00:12:07
Speaker 1: Let's talk about Arizona. Okay, anytime I travel there and it's daylight saving time, I get messed up. What's up with Arizona.
00:12:18
Speaker 2: So, Arizona is one of the last holdouts in not participating in the time switch, and their argument is actually energy based as well. The origin of daylight savings is trying not to spend fuel that could go to other purposes on generating artificial light. Arizona's argument these days is, look, it's really hot here, and so if people are awake, you know, longer during daylight hours, that's more time that it's really hot, and you know, we have to do air conditioning and things like that. Our people are just miserable. So you know, it doesn't save us any energy to move the clocks later in the summer. We actually want it to get dark earlier in Arizona so that the temperature goes down and things are more pleasant.
00:13:12
Speaker 1: Uh.
00:13:12
Speaker 2: The other big one that that doesn't participate is Hawaii, which uh, you know, doesn't directly border anything else. And also they're far enough in the tropics that the change in the length of the day isn't that great to begin with, so it doesn't make as much of a difference if they push daylight back and forth. So so Hawaii for a long time, doesn't it.
00:13:34
Speaker 1: Is Hawaiian Pacific time zone, or that they have a whole they're their own time zone. They have their own time zone.
00:13:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think they're they're five hours off East Coast time.
00:13:43
Speaker 1: So and and just to make this another of us, the Navajo Nation within Arizona does not observe daylight saving time, right.
00:13:53
Speaker 2: And there's there's been, you know, for a long time some counties in Indiana that that stay with the they go with the central zone because even though the boundary is supposed to be a state boundary, most of the people there work in Chicago or in in Springfield, and so that they you know, they go with the Illinois time because that's where most of the people are are working.
00:14:17
Speaker 1: I gotta say, I travel a lot, and I travel west a lot. And every time we hit Central Tennessee, not Oakridge, Tennessee, near there, and you get that extra hour, you really feel like you're beating time, you know, like you're really getting something in your pocket. I got.
00:14:36
Speaker 2: I got myself in trouble one time because I was going from Georgia to Alabama to give a talk and you know, spending a leisurely morning, and then I realized very belatedly that there was a time change involved. I guess it was the other way. I was started in Alabama and I was going to Georgia, and then I was like, oh crap, it's like a different time zone. Like I have an hour less to get there than I think I do.
00:15:03
Speaker 1: So so we got Hawaii, We've got Arizona, we've got parts of Indiana, any other states not observed.
00:15:13
Speaker 2: It changes fairly frequently. I don't know what the current status is. I think that's it at the moment.
00:15:21
Speaker 1: Well, if you ask any politician and they have nothing else to talk about, they're going to tell you they want to get rid of it.
00:15:28
Speaker 2: Sometimes if they have other things that they could be talking about, and they want to not to be talking about them.
00:15:34
Speaker 1: I think I think you're actually more accurate on that.
00:15:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, the issue there is, you know, everybody says they hate it because it's inconvenient, like twice a year, right, so you know there's those two days where you have to reset all the clocks in your house, and you know that's that's awkward. But as I said at the beginning, it gets us two things that we like. We tried in the early nineteen seventies during the oil crunch, there was a law passed to actually go to year round daylight saving time and took effect in January, and by October when the time to roll the clocks back came around, by then they had within ten months they had repealed the law. And we've moved the clocks back again. And the reason is without if you stay on the daylight saving time that we use in the summer, then sunrise in a lot of East Coast cities in December is like nine in the morning, right, and so you know, children waiting for the bus, the sun isn't up yet, and people hate that even more than they hate resetting their clocks. And so we went back to the system of springing forward and falling back. You know, the real disruptive one is the spring where you have to move the clocks forward, because everybody loses an hour of sleep there, and that's kind of nobody. Nobody likes that. The fall one people don't mind so much because you know, there's one weekend a year when you get an extra hour of sleep, and that's kind of nice.
00:17:11
Speaker 1: It messes the kids up, though, the.
00:17:14
Speaker 2: Kids and dogs. The dog is outraged every November. We know, why is my breakfast an hour late?
00:17:22
Speaker 1: Right? And our kids it just seems to be and you you talk to the teachers at school, and it is. It's school. It really ex younger children.
00:17:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, my joke solution to this problem is that we should we should keep the fall back one. We should keep that one weekend a year where everybody gets an extra hour of sleep, but we should get rid of the spring forward and instead, starting at the winter solstice December twenty first, give or take every weekend, move forward five minutes for twelve and that gets you back to an hour forward in the middle of March, right, and and that you know, five minutes a weekend. Nobody would notice that, and you know your the clock in my car is off by five minutes already, so it'd be fine. It wouldn't wouldn't disrupt anything, and then you would you would smooth out that spring forward bit and still have the nice you know, Oh I get some extra sleep tonight.
00:18:24
Speaker 1: Well, Chad, most clocks these days do it themselves.
00:18:29
Speaker 2: Right, you're taking your time off. You know, if I really care what time it is, I look at my smartphone, which has the time automatically updated from from the internet. Now, every time I pitched that idea, everybody who works with computers who hears it just throws.
00:18:43
Speaker 1: Things at me.
00:18:45
Speaker 2: They don't want to they know what would be involved in dealing with that.
00:18:48
Speaker 1: But well, so, Chad, there is this perception that because I remember before the last, the most recent election, it was Senator Marco Rubio who who was really on the charge along. It was a bipartisan effort, but to to get rid of daylight saving time because they people believe it's an outdated concept. But from what you're telling me, it's not an outdated concept. We still it's still applicable to our lives, even in twenty twenty five.
00:19:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's you know, as I said, it's a question of priorities and what are you what are you looking for? And I think the important thing to keep in mind is, you know, the whole system is pretty arbitrary, right. Our system of time zones relies on us pretending that it is the precise same time of day in eastern Maine and western Indiana, and that's you know, that makes no actual geographical or astronomical sense, but we do it because it's convenient. It means that, you know, except for a handful of border regions, right, you're not going to drive anywhere and have the time of day change in a way that's going to be irritating. It's really easy to coordinate activities over you know, the kind of span that you can can drive in a car in a day, and that works out pretty nicely and makes everybody's lives a lot easier. If we're already disrupting, you know, the natural order of people in eastern Maine and western Indiana enough to to you know, arbitrarily assign them the same time, it's not that much more of a disruption to have to change the clocks every now and then, and then you get those nice long summer evenings, and then it's not pitch dark when you arrive at work in December mornings, and everybody's probably happier for it.
00:20:46
Speaker 1: Looking at this from a historical perspective, daylight saving time time zones, they are part of the rise of capitalism, right they were? You know it was business who created these, right, American businesses. American industry created this.
00:21:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, I said, it's the quintess It's adopted through the quintessential American process of having large corporations lobby for it and get the system adopted that way.
00:21:18
Speaker 1: Was there anything at the stint around the same time happening in Europe? Were they asking for this? You know? Because it is? Is this an American innovation that spread worldwide?
00:21:33
Speaker 2: Now, the the Europeans were thinking along similar lines. And there's actually a major conference in the mid eighteen eighties that's that's held in Washington, d C. Where they bring together representatives of all the major world powers and talk about we should standardize times sort of globally. Most European countries had already within their own borders set up up standard time. They just made a time zone that is their own country. And then you know, there was some coordination among nations that shared borders and so on. So there was this move to standardize everything in the eighteen eighties. The big sticking point ended up being where do you put the zero? Where do you call what do you call zero? Longitude? Where you know? And then everybody references their clocks to that. And the two big contenders were Greenwich, England and Paris, France, and Paris had sort of the claim of having an older, more prestigious observatory that had been in the business longer. The British counter argument was that like seventy five percent of world shipping used maps that were made in the UK, and that ended up carrying the day. The US had, because of William Allen already sinked their clocks to something that was based on the the time in Greenwich, and so we were fine with it, and so it went along, and so the French got out voted because most people were using British nautical maps anyway, and it was just easier to go with that and use the time based on Greenwich.
00:23:18
Speaker 1: Well, Chad, where can people find your work?
00:23:22
Speaker 2: I have a substack on you know, under my own name, on a lot of things. The books are available wherever books are sold.
00:23:31
Speaker 1: I've been speaking with Chad Orzelle. He's author of the book A Brief History of Time Keeping, The science of marking time from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks. He's also an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Chad, thank you so much. It's been great.
00:23:52
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me on.
00:23:53
Speaker 1: Thank you. You've been listening to American History Holine, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show's executive producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers from iHeart are Jordan Runtall and Jason English. Original music composed by me Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our email is Americanhistory Hotline at gmail dot com. If you like the show, please tell your friends and leave us a review in Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Feel free to hit me up on social media to ask a history question or to let me know what you think of the show. You can find me at Bob Crawford Base. Thanks so much for listening. See you next week.
