OPINION
OK, here’s a little bit of pithy wisdom I’d not heard before but which will prove handy to folk like me who are forever trying to remember whether clocks go backward or forward at the beginning or ending of daylight savings time:
Spring forwards, fall backwards.
Aha, sorted. So, this being fall (or autumn – more on that later), the clocks go back. Awesome: an hour’s sleep in on Sunday.
As you lie in bed, savouring that extra hour before you actually have to get up and do something or be somewhere, spare a thought for George Hudson – the Kiwi responsible for your extra hour of sleep.
Contrary to the movie National Treasure, Benjamin Franklin was not the first to propose daylight-savings time. It is true that, while envoy to France in 1784, he wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to the Journal de Paris, advising famously night-life loving Parisians to go to bed earlier and get up in the morning to save on candles. Pushing the satire further, he proposed taxing window shutters, rationing candles and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise.
In fact, in Franklin’s day, daylight savings wouldn’t have even made sense: no one used co-ordinated times and schedules. Clocks from one town to the next might ring the hour at very different times of the day.
It was only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and especially the spread of railways that necessitated standardised times. After all, it was no good if a train left Paddington at nine am, but it was still 8.45 am in Ealing.
With that standardisation, though, the ancient timekeeping of dusk-til-dawn was dethroned for good. But some still yearned to take advantage of the long daylight hours of summer.
George wasn’t just some lazy layabout who wanted more sleep in winter however. Back in 1895, George was a post office employee by day and a keen amateur entomologist (insect enthusiast) outside of his work hours. It was in the final hours of daylight, after he finished work for the day, when George was able to spend time seeking out and collecting a wide range of bugs. The problem for George and his peers however, was those hours weren’t long and plentiful.
In 1895, he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society suggesting a two-hour daylight-saving shift in time to create lighter evenings for hobbyists such as himself to utilise. While his idea got some support, it wasn’t enough to initiate any official appetite for change, and George had to wait over three decades for New Zealand to introduce daylight saving time (and he only got one hour, not the two he had originally proposed).
Three decades later was, of course, the Great War. Finally, Franklin’s proposal to save money on candles (and now, coal and gas) finally came into its own.
Builder (and great-grandfather of Chris Martin of Coldplay fame) William Willett published a pamphlet called The Waste of Daylight in 1907, in which he proposed clocks should be advanced by 20 minutes each week in April, making a total of 80 minutes of time change, and then reversed in the same way in September. He argued this would create lighter evenings, saving a few million pounds in lighting costs, and would prevent people “wasting daylight”. His idea gained support from many, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Winston Churchill, but was still rejected by the British government of the time.
The outbreak of the World War I brought his idea back in favour, however, with the need to save coal. Willett’s much-publicised campaigning got the attention of Germany and Austria, and driven by a need to save coal and candles, as well as extending the working day to help the war effort, the two countries introduced daylight saving time in 1916. A few weeks later Britain followed suit, and on Sunday, May 21, 1916 enacted a change of one hour to clock times as a wartime production-boosting device under the Defence of the Realm Act. Other countries involved in the war followed suit, including the USA, where it became known as “war time”, reflecting the reason behind the change.
Way down in the Antipodes, though, New Zealand, which had led the world in such modern ideas as universal suffrage, was lagging behind.
But for George and his bugs in New Zealand, it was a longer wait. It was in 1927, 32 years after he had first suggested the idea, that daylight saving time was finally introduced in New Zealand.
NZ Herald
Australia used daylight savings in WWI and WWII, but dropped it in peacetime until Tasmania adopted it in 1968. The mainland states (excepting WA) followed suit in 1971. Queensland, though, dropped it again in 1972: the joke at the time was that Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen reckoned the sun shone out of his arse – and he wasn’t getting up an hour earlier for anybody.
As for the United States, here’s a chance to debunk a couple of related myths:
Firstly, daylight savings was not introduced in the US to benefit farmers. In fact, farmers have been one of the most consistent lobby groups against it, because so much of their schedule follows the times of the seasons, not the clock.
Secondly, the American “fall” is not a dumbed-down version of autumn (‘leaves fall down’). In fact, fall is from a more ancient English term: the fall of the year. Autumn is a Latin loan-word, introduced by pretentious public-school types.
Anyway, I’m still looking forward to that extra hour of sleep – and confusing the dog, who’ll be expecting his morning walk an hour later.