Most people living today take Daylight Savings time for granted. They don’t really think of it as a concept–they may note when it starts and ends, and gripe about it when it intrudes on their schedules (and often muddles them up). But they don’t really think about the concept: or whether there’s any basis for the practice. Not only whether there’s any real purpose for the practice ‘any more’, but whether there was EVER any legitimate basis for such an idea.
The ultimate basis for chronological fiddling is the fact that humans were originally tropical creatures. It’s somewhat odd, indeed, that many science fiction writers posit worlds with ‘four seasons’. Most of the Earth’s landmasses do NOT have four seasons. Only parts of the temperate zones have such seasons: the conditions that create (or prevent) a ‘four seasons’ model include factors like mountain ranges, large bodies of water, etc.
Other places have really only two seasons: Winter and summer, wet and dry, etc,
But even more critical is the differences in annual light budgets. Outside of the tropics, day lengths vary widely. Days was what it was in the beginning: in societies which had very little in the way of artificial lighting, most activities (sometimes all activities) took place in the daytime. In places where the length of the day varied widely, this meant that the length of hours became widely variant. In ancient extratropical civilizations, there tended to be twelve hours of daylight defined for every day: but in the winter, hours were shorter, and in summers, longer. The division of the day into twelve hours probably began in the early base 60 numerical systems. (60 is 12 * 5, so the system consisted of fivefold base 12 numbers, in much the same way that modern ‘binary’ systems are actually expressed as hexadecimal numbers).
Since a most days from sunrise to sunrise can be fairly neatly divided into 24 hours (in a base 60 system), dividing days from sunrise to sunset became, in many places, a matter of dividing the day into uneven-length hour so that there were 12 hours each day.
With the development of mechanical clocks, it became necessary to standardize the length of hours–and to set the number of hours at 24 exactly on the equinoctes.
This meant, however, that some hours which were dark in the winter were light in the summer–and that schedules got a bit skewed. This wasn’t such a serious problem when most people were involved in agriculture, because agricultural schedules were set by circadian rhythms anyway. But when the majority of people became involved in nonagricultural pursuits, it became a matter of requiring more artificial lighting, if people stayed on the same schedules year-round.
The idea of Daylight Savings Time was to reduce the amount of energy used for artificial lighting by rescheduling activities during the longer daytime hours of summer. When it was first introduced, it was strongly objected to by farmers, because it meant that farmers’ schedules were no longer synchronized with the animals–or with those of other humans. But farmers didn’t have a lot of political clout at the time, so the practice was implemented over their objections.
Since then, although the length of Daylight Savings Time has been changed several places in varied circumstances, there has been no serious attempt to eliminate the process entirely.
People knew, of course, that they themselves were suffering with the time changes. This was before anybody had ever even heard the term ‘jet lag’–but people knew that they were having problems, even so. They knew intuitively that they were losing sleep. They probably also realized that there was more stress, and that injuries and deaths often ensued, because sleep-deprived people are of course clumsier and less able to make good decisions,
It took quite some time before people began to actually gather statistics to support or disprove these intuitive impressions. To nobody’s surprise, the impressions were supported, To some people’s surprise, it wasn’t a matter of simply a day or two of incapacity. It’s not a matter of people losing just one hour of sleep on one day in the year. For some people, the adjustment is never made. But for most people, it’s a matter of at least a week. And during this period, the same problems pertain: sleepy people making mistakes, missteps, miscalculations…
Furthermore, in case you’ve wondered, it’s not the case that people working on night shifts don’t suffer from the time change. They may not lose an hour’s sleep–but they’re forced to work an hour longer than their regular schedule. So if they normally work an 8-hour shift, they have to work 9 hours. And though they get a shorter shift when Daylight Savings Time ends, they don’t get back the energy they wasted in the 9-hour shift–that’s gone forever.
All these are burdens faced by individuals (unless a mistake made by an individual affects others–sometimes MANY others). But surely, one might ask, the energy saved would compensate for the injuries to health, wealth, and wisdom?
Well, no. The idea is that people will not use as much energy if they’re not working in hours of darkness. But this assumes that lights are turned off when nobody’s working in offices or driving on roads, or otherwise using the lights. This is an invalid assumption. Offices, shops, factories, etc are lighted 24/7, whether people are in them, or not. Too often, this applies to residences, as well. And there’s no real exception when it’s light outside. Most lights are NEVER turned off–even outdoor lighting on the brightest of sunny days.
The result is that there’s almost certainly little or no energy saved. to compensate for the heavy health and safety costs. So it’s really all for nowt, in other words.
And matters have been made MUCH worse for the past seven years or so, at least in the US, because rather than ELIMINATING Daylight Savings Time entirely. the period of purgatory has been LENGTHENED. This matter is past due for a rethink–and possibly a revocation of the extension, which does NOBODY any good, but many people harm.
For today’s less obvious question, it occurred to me to wonder: What IS “fuller’s earth”? I have to admit that I don’t really understand the concept of ‘fulling’. I know it has something to do with cloth, but I’ve never really understood the explanations I’ve been given. Anyway, apparently “fuller’s earth” is a clay which decolorizes (? you got me. I didn’t even know this was a word) oils and other liquids. But what this has to do with clothmaking is beyond ME.
treraia 