Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving

Almost a hundred years ago lawmakers embraced the idea of saving an hour of daylight: their movement made law but leads to modern confusion over why clocks should change. Here's a history not just of daylight savings time's evolution, but all kinds of clock tinkering processes around the world. Spring Forward: The Annual Madness Of Daylight Saving Time uses news reports, Congressional hearings, and more to chart the origins and modern controversies of daylight savings.

For those of us who have grown up at a time when we automatically spring ahead and fall back each year, Michael Downing has written a wonderfully detailed and hysterically funny book about Daylight Saving Time and the attempts to come to some justification and standardization for it. As he indicates, how does one "save" sunlight? Downing begins with Congress's passage of a Daylight Saving bill in 1918 only to be repealed a year later. The ensuing chaos is worth the price of the book. State legislatures, local governments and citizens up in arms tried (and often succeeded) in changing the time that would suit themselves or their constituents best. The book is full of witty anecdotes. On April 24, 1932 he cites two persons who "died" of DST....the first account tells of a Chicago woman who climbed a ladder to change her clock, fell, and broke her neck. On the same day a Pennsylvania man who was so concerned about getting together a petition to repeal Daylight Saving Time died of a heart attack. Downing, however, has many serious points in his references. I couldn't quite believe it when I read that for years China, geographically as large as the United States, had only one time zone! "Spring Forward" delves into the proponents and opponents of DST and how they've jockeyed for positions of power on the subject. It is an exposure of years of government dithering and Downing delivers a quick thrust of the knife into the heart of political cowardice. I heartily recommend this book as a quick, easy, informative and very funny read on the subject of Daylight Saving Time.

I looked on the back of this book and saw that one of the proponents of Daylight Saving Time was Richard Nixon. Then I saw that one of the opponents of Daylight Saving Time was Richard Nixon. Yep, I decided, this book has to make good sense. At least as good a sense as Daylight Saving Time does. Then he said on the first page that he adjusted his clocks before he went to bed instead of at 2 AM. His neighbor told him that he was breaking Federal law. The neighbor then said that if the Feds came around he would lie for him and give him an alibi. Then on Page 4 Britain's Royal Astronomer suggested that in addition to changing the clocks that the thermometer should be put up ten degrees in the winter so we would be warmer. I was hooked. The conclusions of the book: nobody knows why we have it, nobody can prove any savings (or cost). My real conclusions on this book. Be prepared to laugh. (I also found it necessary to telephone people and read them parts of it.)

This is one of those books that will appeal to those who always wonder why things are the way they are. Downing introduces his subject by listing all of the explanations he's heard for the existence of Daylight Saving Time and the various dates he's heard it was enacted. The stories are inconsistent and none of them make much sense. Dowling's curiosity about what the real story behind Daylight Saving Time was the impetus behind his writing this book and my reading the book. I wasn't disappointed. Downing begins with the origination of the idea of Daylight Saving in England, takes you through its first implementation in Germany during WWI, quickly followed by Allied nations including the United States. The story is interesting in that the debate surrounding Daylight Savings has been more or less active from 1918 forward. The players usually don't come down on the side you've been led to believe by your parents and the media. This is a great book for those who see what most people perceive as non-noteworthy occurences and feel the need to understand how they came to be. Highly recommended.

Around 1965 when my friends and I would go to the movies, along with the previews of coming attractions, we would be treated to a polemical short film designed to teach us the evils of Daylight Saving Time. "Do you want to lose an hour of sleep every night?" boomed the self-important voice, as a cartoon illustration of a red-eyed man appeared on the screen. "Do you want your children staying out after bedtime because it is still light?" My buddies and I thought it funny at the time to answer back "No!" to the first question and "Yes!" to the second. We did not know it at the time, but were doing our small part to continue a storm of controversy and puzzlement over clock-shifting. In _Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time_ (Shoemaker & Hoard), Michael Downing has given a sprightly history of a peculiarity in timekeeping that has pleased and bothered people ever since it was first seriously proposed for action. You might think that the only confusion that DST causes is for people who forget on the appointed night to change their clocks, or our surprise in the first week over how high the sun seems compared to the nights before the change. The truth is that there is much more confusion to go around on an issue that you probably thought was simple. The US adopted DST in 1918, but repealed it just a year later; the repeal was sparked by protests by farmers, who were among the first, though certainly not the last, to insist on a return to what they viewed as "God's time." How God came to divide the day into twenty-four hours, however, they did not clarify. The influence of farmers, however, could not compete with that of Wall Street, which liked the idea since it meant that there would be a one hour window in the morning when both the New York Exchange and the London Exchange were open simultaneously, permitting exploitation of prices during those sixty minutes. In fact, the New York Exchange so missed the lucrative hour when DST was repealed that it put itself on DST just for trading hours. Exchanges in Boston and Philadelphia did not want to lose out, so they followed suit, small islands of anomalous time within the nation. The patchwork coverage of DST and the attempted legal patches to make it all sensible resulted in timely confusion. If you drove the 35 miles from Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, West Virginia, and wanted your watch to keep the local time, you would have to change it seven times on the route. In St. Paul, Minnesota, there was an eighteen-story office building with nine floors on DST and nine floors not. From time to time, like during wars, DST was promoted as the patriotic thing to do, since it saved energy, but this has not conclusively been shown. Some think there are good scientific reasons for DST, but there is no science behind it. What powers DST in a small way is emotion; most people simply like the long summer evenings (and Downing admits that he is one of these). I like it