Fall is upon us. Tree leaves are turning from a lush green to a vibrant palette of yellow, orange and red. The temperature is dropping with each subsequent week. The days have already been shrinking, and legislators have set our clocks back an hour. It now gets dark at 4:33 p.m. Before the end of the semester, we'll lose 19 more minutes of that daylight. So, how did Daylight Savings Time (DST) come to be? Moreover, what is the story of time, and how have humans come to manage it?
First of all, it may come as a shock that "time" as we know it has not been around for more than 200 years. I am not suggesting that pre-19th century civilizations were beholden to a different set of physical laws. They simply defined their days according to sunrise and sunset. The first clocks came about even before the dawn of the Common Era. These primitive sundials indicated what point of the day it was with some accuracy, while carefully calibrated devices like hourglasses and water clocks could act as timers and make their measurement without any external light sources.
Mechanical clocks were pioneered by Arab scientists around the 11th century. By the end of the middle ages, these timekeeping devices had spread to Europe, becoming commonplace in the towers of cathedrals and civic buildings. Their accuracy had become reasonable for everyday life, but they were not synchronized. There was no need to keep the same clock settings two towns over if one could not travel or communicate that far easily. As a result, most clocks were arbitrarily calibrated.
This all changed in the 18th century. Britain had become a worldwide seafaring empire. Its captains needed a way to discern where in the world they were. Distance from the equator could be determined easily by the angle of the sun to the horizon. Distance around the world, however, was trickier.
The British solved this problem as follows: First, they set a universal time at Greenwich. A newly developed clock, which barely skipped ahead or fell behind, allowed captains to carry that time with them wherever they sailed. Navigators could tell the local time anywhere on the globe by viewing the sky. These time differences could then be used to compute the location of a ship around the 360 degrees of the Earth as a difference between the two values. As such, sailors were the first to adopt the notion of a "universal time" and a "local time," but the notion was strictly for the purpose of navigation.
The first widespread synchronization on land was spearheaded by the advent of the railroads. For the first time, a land-based service required the use of a standard schedule in order to operate efficiently. Rail also divvied up most of our nation into its four time zones 40 years before Congress got around to it. Time as we know it was born.
The idyllic idea behind DST is that it shifts the activities people do into the hours when the sun is out, thus helping save money and allowing more time for activities. So, what is my problem with DST? Research refutes its utility.
To begin, the promised energy savings are all insignificant. In addition, half of our nation does not like the change. Our circadian clocks do not adjust for weeks afterward. The productivity of workers and students drops. The practice is a public health issue: Heart attacks rise in the days following the setback in March when an hour's worth of sleep is wrested from us. In short, we have become the masters of mismanaging time. This archaic ritual is more trouble than it's worth.
Petar Todorov is a senior who is majoring in chemistry. He can be reached at Petar.Todorov@tufts.edu.
