Why Does America Have A 25 Hours Day?

Time is precious. It can never be gained, only lost. So how did the notion of increasing the time come into place?

Daylight Saving Time (DST) is the practice of moving the clocks forward one hour from Standard Time during the summer months and changing them back again in the fall. The general idea is that this allows us all to make better use of natural daylight: moving the clocks forward one hour in the spring grants us more daylight during summer evenings while moving clocks back one hour in the fall grants us more daylight during winter mornings.

Most of the United States begins Daylight Saving Time at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday in March and reverts to standard time on the first Sunday in November. In the U.S., each time zone switches at a different time.

Benjamin Franklin takes the honour or the blame, depending on your view of the time changes, for coming up with the idea to reset clocks in the summer months as a way to conserve energy. His “An Economical Project,” written in 1784, is the earliest known proposal to “save” daylight. By moving clocks forward, people could take advantage of the extra evening daylight rather than wasting energy on lighting. He did write a satirical letter to The Journal of Paris (where he was living in 1784) suggesting that the city would save 64,050,000 pounds of candle wax burned if only its citizens would rise with the sun.

But the idea originated from the New Zealand scientist George Vernon Hudson and British builder William Willett. In 1895, Hudson presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a 2-hour shift forward in October and a 2-hour shift back in March. There was interest in the idea, but it was never followed through.

To summarize, days are longer in the summer and shorter in the winter, and with daylight saving time, you can optimize your clocks for both seasons. And if you’re wondering where this all started, well then, you’d have to go back in time.

The first country to implement daylight saving time was Germany in 1916. Looking to save money on energy costs during World War I, they launched a daylight saving practice followed by most of Europe, and finally by the United States in 1918.

DST was implemented in the United States nationally on March 31, 1918, as a wartime effort to save an hour’s worth of fuel each day to light lamps and coal to heat homes. It was repealed nationwide in 1919 and then maintained by some individual localities such as New York City in what Time Magazine called “a chaos of clocks” until 1966 when the Uniform Time Act made DST consistent nationwide.

After the war, a free-for-all system in which U.S. states and towns were given the choice of whether or not to observe DST led to chaos. And in 1966, to control such chaos, Congress enacted the Uniform Time Act. That federal law meant that any state observing DST had to follow a uniform protocol throughout the state in which daylight saving time would begin on the first Sunday of April and end on the last Sunday of October.

And from an economic standpoint, it kind of made some sense.

Later daylight means more people shopping after work, increasing retail sales, and more people driving, increasing gas and snacks sales for eight months of the year. In 1984, Fortune magazine estimated that a seven-week extension of DST would yield an additional $30 million for 7-Eleven stores, and the National Golf Foundation estimated the extension would increase golf industry revenues from $200 million to $300 million. A 1999 study estimated that DST increases the revenue of the European Union’s leisure sector by about 3%.

In 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy determined that extending daylight saving time by four weeks under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 saved 5 per cent more electricity per day for a total of 1.3 billion kilowatt-hours which if you consider, is quite a hefty amount. Moreover, crime rates and traffic accidents decrease as a result of less evening activity in the dark. It turns out that moving the clock doesn’t just affect the economy, but it also affects health and well-being.

Studies show that this disruption to sleep increases the risk of stroke and heart attack. Heart attacks increase by 24% in the week after the clocks move ahead in March. It even leads to more accidents. In the US, car crashes caused by “sleepy daylight-saving drivers” may have killed at least 30 extra people during 2002–2011. In the mining industry, there’s a 6% rise in injuries which leads to a 67% increase in workdays that are lost.

Employees are more prone to error because of sleep deprivation in the days immediately following the beginning of daylight saving time, ultimately costing their employers money. And this happens because moving the clock ahead affects our natural sleep cycle. A study authored by professors Matthew J. Kotchen and Laura E. Grant looked at energy use in Indiana, a state that began observing daylight saving time in 2006. They compared the demand for electricity before and after the change and found that time change actually increased demand from 1 to 4 per cent a year.

In fact, the American economy alone loses $434 million annually from this clock-changing business. And there are no “extra” productivity gains either. People don’t just go to sleep after dark. They can still work. But despite all this evidence, countries like the US still insist on changing the clock twice a year and if you’re wondering why…

Well, Micheal Downing, author of “Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time” has a theory.

Transcript:

We have DST for a number of reasons, so whether we need it or not is a big question. We originally did it hoping to save energy. People thought that they were wasting these early morning hours of sunlight by keeping their blinds closed during the summer hours at, say, 05:00 when the sun rose. It didn’t really work out as easily as people hoped it would. It seemed like a pretty simple idea, shifting the clocks. Our use of energy is not just for lighting, we use it for air conditioning, we use it for home heating fuel. So our use is not so predictable as the early adopters of daylight saving hoped it would be.

This, by the way, has racked Congress for more than 100 years. It’s a never-ending debate. And what we don’t tend to know as Americans is that the biggest lobby on behalf of daylight savings since 1915 in this country and to this very day is the Chamber of Commerce. They understood something very early on. If you give workers daylight when they leave their jobs, they are much more apt to stop and shop on their way homes. Daylight saving is a loser as an energy plan, but it’s a fantastic retail spending plan. Since 1966 every 20 years, Congress gives us another month extending the period of daylight saving. We’re now up to eight months. So standard time we only have for four months a year, which tells us that, literally speaking, daylight saving has become our standard time. I don’t think it’s ever going away.

And so, despite all evidence against this confusing practice, America and other countries may keep changing their clock for the foreseeable future.