When did people start traveling libg distances fast enough for jet lag to be a thing? Did it exist before jets? Before airplanes? Before air travel? Did passengers on the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg experience anything like it?
I think you may find that, before airplanes, travel wasn’t fast enough to create this problem. When jet lag was first described, it was discussed as a new phenomenon
Ninjaed by a minute. I also saw the LA Times article.
But that’s what you get when you hurry your research. Given an extra couple of minutes I found this.
In The inky fool, Mark Forsyth cites a 1965 usage:
The inevitable result of real, literal jet-setting is jet lag, which was first recorded in 1965. It popped up in the New York Herald Tribune and is described thuslyly:
- Jet lag strikes suddenly. The victim disembarks from the…plane feeling gay as a sprite, dashes through customs, checks into home or a hotel, … greets friends and in the course of the next few hours falls into a light coma.
Since normal passenger air service had been around for decades earlier, the problem of passing rapidly through time zones would have an issue long before if the speeds were great enough. Possibly a few early military pilots on emergency runs pushing speeds may have felt lag, but that probably was subsumed under all the other fatigues of flying those planes.
The question becomes how fast do you need to fly to get jet lag? The answer is probably around 500 mph since that’s the speed of the earliest passenger jets.
Really? A DC 3 took a bit more than twice as long as the six hours it takes a modern jet to travel from San Francisco to Hawaii. They both can arrive the same day they took off. Passengers on both are going to still wake up the morning after 3 hours earlier than they are used to.
ETA: Wait! Is jet lag just traveling East?
We took the QE2 from New York to Le Havre, and we experienced a form of jet lag, because traveling east you lost an hour pretty much every night. This was well after jets, but I wonder if people experienced this before jets. It’s not something I’ve ever seen on any stories set on ocean liners back in the '30s.
At the equator you change time by an hour roughly every 1000 miles. The average person needs about 24 hours per hour of time change to avoid jet lag. So if you can travel faster than 1000 miles in a day you could get jet lag. That’s only 42 MPH if you travel for 24 hours straight. That’s faster than an ocean liner but slower than a car. A DC-7 prop plane from 1955 could cruise at 365 MPH. That plenty fast enough to get jet lag, but the range was 3000 miles so you would have to refuel to get more than a modest 3-hour jet lag. I think it wasn’t until transoceanic flights became routine that the jet lag started to get significant.
People on average adjust to time change about 1 hour per day so that rate would be right in line with what you could tolerate without significant jet lag.
You get jet lag in either direction. But losing time is harder to adjust to than gaining time.
This. Japan is 13 hours ahead of eastern standard time. When my wife and I fly from Michigan to Japan, we try to stretch our day by 11 hours. But when we return home, we don’t try to shorten our day by 11 hours - instead, we stretch our day by 13 hours. Staying up several hours later than your body is used to is easier than trying to go to sleep several hours earlier than your body is used to.
We crossed on the QE2 in 1971, and found the one-hour-per-night change no problem at all. It was one of the great advantages of the ship over flying: no jet lag.
Of course, I was 16 at the time. I wonder if it would have more of an effect now that I’m 67. Unfortunately, I’m not likely to be able to find out.
Shift workers have known about the equivalent of jet lag for a vastly longer time. Of course, no member of the jet-set would have had any clue about that.
Managing sleep patterns for shift workers follows that same rules as for travel. So long as those creating the rosters care enough to get it right.
The US transcontinental railroad would take you between NY and SF (about 2900 miles) in a little over 3 days by the early 1900s, at an average speed of about 35 mph. This might have been enough to induce jet lag if “one extra hour per day” is enough.
The Trans-Siberian Railroad made a longer voyage (about seven time zones). But apparently took about four weeks for the trip in the early 20th century, and so it doesn’t seem likely that people would have noticed “jet lag” as much.
Having it happen five days in a row was more of a problem than the change each night. When we drive across the country a time change every three days wasn’t an issue at all.
And it might have been that we lost an hour of fun each night. If we did a trans Atlantic crossing again, we’d go west.
The difference with shift work is that the sun doesn’t change. The change in sunlight when you travel is what cues your body to change its rhythm. With shift work, it’s a lot harder on your body.
Earlier thread about the topic (which I started). I would argue that a jet lag of one hour per day (which is achievable by railroad or steam ship travel) may be enough to make people complain; after all, people complain about the transitions to and from DST, which are by the same amount.
Everything I’ve been able to Google is that it took roughly 12-15 hours in the mid-1950s to go from NYC to London via Gander, Newfoundland and Shannon, Ireland. That’s a 7.5 hour direct flight today. So yeah, roughly twice as long.
Let’s say you leave NYC at 9 am local time, and you land 13 hours later at 10 pm NYC time, which is 2 am London time. All I can guess is that you would just go to bed when you got there, and wake up at normal London time, giving yourself a short night of sleep, and presumably just catching up from there without the extreme disruption that a flight that was half as long induces.
Personally, I don’t find a time zone difference up to 3 hours all that big of a deal, even with jet transportation. Six or seven though; that does mess me up for a few days.
I see @hajario said that Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad mentioned lag as a fact. I’d like to see the context of the comment. It’s odd that no one else seems to have mentioned lag in that era or the early 20th century, especially after much faster ocean liners were introduced. If it were really a normal thing, you’d think that every “what to know about travel” article would make a point of it.
Thanks, commasense. I was going to ask if the time change was accounted for daily.
In this post: During the age of steamers, would people complain about jetlag? - #8 by hajario
I read that book in the 90s. My recollection is that he talked about how they had to adjust their pocket watches every day or two and things like meal times adjusted accordingly.
That’s time change as a fact. It doesn’t say anything one way or the other about feeling the effects of lag.
So we still have no evidence at all about lag before jets.
Thank you for responding, though.