In the 1970s, the US stayed on Daylight Saving Time all year round for a year and a half - and school kids like me did walk to school in the dark (we were issued flashlights with red caps intended to help us cross streets without getting run down).
And nowadays, it’s already common for kids (and their teachers) to be going to school in the dark.
My recollection is that the USA went to DST in early January 1974 only for that year. The Commerce Department realized that was a mistake. The start of Daylight Time for 1975 and later was moved from the last Sunday in April to the first Sunday in April.
Yes, Kids were issued flashlights as a stop-gap measure for that year. The school committee in my town was considering adjusting school hours for the following year until Congress abandoned year-round DST.
Based on what I found, DST started in January 1974 and lasted until April of 1975 - so not quite a year and a half.
I was a student back then and it sucked walking to the school bus stop in the dark.
It also sucked to walk the several blocks to school in the dark.
That law was superseded in October, 1974, to revert to Standard time from 27-OCT-1974 to 23-FEB-1975. Thence, Standard Time reverted to the late October to late April rule… The primary motivation was school children and construction workers who didn’t want to work in the dark.
Thanks. I misunderstood an article I read - the original plan was for DST to go until April 1975, but as you say, this was superseded in Oct 1974.
Sure you could do it. If you really used local time, it would raise havoc with train and bus schedules. My father (b. 1906) told me that he remembered the town clock in Media, PA being 3 minutes behind the one on Philadelphia city hall. Standard Time was called Railroad Time in his youth.
I really like the idea, mentioned above, of a 364 day calendar with a leap week added every five or six years. Sure people probably couldn’t work it out long in advance, but the calendar makers could.
Try “Why??”
I teach my student to use this date code (today is 210309) in computer science so they can easily tell their latest draft and as it sorts on name order their latest draft will always be at the top…
Growing up IIRC, Saudi Arabia was on solar time.
You have less than 79 years until Y2.1K.
A sovereign nation can do whatever it wants. If I remember correctly, Kiribati changed its time zone (from the far west to the far east) in the late 1990s specifically so that it would be the very first place to welcome the new millenium.
And I think China is just one time zone.
That’s the reason lots of other people thought they did it, but not the reason they actually did it.
Part of the country was almost full day (22 hours) behind the rest of it. This made for lots of administrative headaches, so they moved that small part (which had maybe 1000 people in it) forward by 24 hours to be on the same day as the rest of it. Becoming the first place for the millennium was an incidental side effect.
IIRC, India took 3 time zones and made them two, so that three hours are split into 2 90 minute zones and things may start at X:30 there when it is Y:00 where you are. Which was very confusing when trying to set up a meeting with my teams there.
Would we be switching to 13 months of exactly 4 weeks each, or just getting rid of December 31st? I like the former idea better, especially if the months started on a Monday.
Which would make scheduling interesting for the Jews…
Here are some good articles on calendar reform: