By ARMAND NARDI, Register Publisher
Daylight saving time kicks back in this weekend: We "spring ahead" on Sunday, losing an hour of sleep that we'll retrieve when we "fall back" in November.
All across the land on Monday people will be slapping the snooze button an hour early wondering, “Whose bright idea was this anyway?”
Benjamin Franklin is often credited with coming up with the idea of what we now call Daylight-Saving Time. It is true that, as an American delegate in Paris in 1784, Mr. Franklin published an essay titled “An Economical Project,” in which he made the simple argument that natural light is cheaper than artificial light.
Franklin calculated that if he had slept until noon, as was usual in Paris, and then stayed awake six hours later in the evening, he would have “wasted” the free daylight and instead would have had to pay for artificial light.
“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
In 1883 the U.S. railroad industry established official time zones with a set standard time within each zone. Congress eventually came on board, signing the railroad time zone system into law in 1918. The only federal regulatory agency in existence at that time happened to be the Interstate Commerce Commission, so Congress granted the agency authority over time zones.
During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt instituted year-round Daylight Saving Time, called “War Time,” from Feb. 9, 1942 to Sept. 30, 1945.
Finally, in 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, which standardized the start and end dates for Daylight Saving Time.
In 2007 Daylight Saving Time was moved up to the second Sunday in March. Supposedly that saves energy. I guess the decision was based on the assumption people only turn on their lights, televisions and computers after the sun goes down.
Forget about "real time" -- time based on the reality of the earth's rotation. By that reckoning, the sun hits its peak in the sky around noon. At this time of year, it comes up a little less than six hours before noon and sets a little less than six hours later.
And lately, if you’ve been unable to get things done in time, it may have been due to the earthquake in Chile. Richard Gross at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California calculated the 8.8-magnitude quake shifted the Earth’s axis and shortening the day by 1.26 millionths of a second.
All that said, fire departments everywhere recommend for public safety reasons that we check those batteries twice a year and the best way to remember is to do so when we “fall back or spring forward!”
So, if you forgot to reset your clock last night, you're already late. You won't be the only one, and you've got a ready-made excuse. Take advantage of it. Go back to bed.
Armand Nardi is the publisher of the Gainesville Daily Register. He can be contacted at: anardi@ntin.net.
