Day light savings time is coming soon and it has me wondering. Right now I am waking up with the sun well past the horizon at 6am and I like that.
My question is this: I know that DST is relatively new. It’s been done since 1968 (I think) and I was wondering what exactly happened to the days prior to setting the clocks forward and back? Was the sun rising at 3am in May and setting at 2p? or what?
What made the " powers that be" change what had been going on for centuries.
I’m living so beyond my income that we may almost said to be living apart
-e e cummings
Couldn’t you just subtract an hour from the normal sunrise/sunset times to get the answer? Or does DST involve more than one hour movement in the time?
The history of daylight saving time, and the standardization of time in general, is really complicated, but also interesting. (I took a semester-long class on this subject. I won’t bore you with the long version :)) If you are interested in reading more about it, I would recommend Keeping Watch: A History of American Time by Michael O’Malley.
Born & raised in Pennsylvania, I generally liked DST except that drive-in movies started so late.
I moved to Michigan where they started even later. Michiganders (& Michigeese, too) seem to hate DST, especially the farmers! I couldn’t understand why, as farmers work according to the sun’s position, not according to the time. But, every year at this time of year, most of the state was upset about the time change. It isn’t suprising that a DST post came from MI!
I don’t know why it happens. I think it’s a plot by smoke-alarm battery salesmen. They always tell us to replace the smoke-alarm batteries at the spring & fall time changes.
It does kinda suck that it happens on a Sunday, too. Can’t use the time change as an excuse to be late for work.
This is my new sig. Thank Wally. It was his idea.
“I made my husband join a bridge club. He jumps next Tuesday.”
I live in the Eastern time zone and sometimes, in the summer months, I’ll get e-mails that say, for example, “The teleconference with the Denver office will be at 2:00 Mountain Standard Time.” So should I call them when the watches and clocks in Denver say 3:00 and it’s 5:00 here? Because when it’s 3:00 Mountain Daylight Time it’s 2:00 Mountain Standard Time. It is as if they are using the term “___ Standard Time” to refer to the standardization of times via the establishment of time zones, when I always took “___ Standard Time” to mean “The time in that time zone when DST is not in effect.” To refer to the time zone itself without regard to what time of year it is, I just say “The teleconference is at 2:00 Mountain Time.”
