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The clocks moved on Sunday, November 2.
This is what happens next. I will wake up at my usual hour. Yet I will get up early. Puzzling?
At 2:00 AM, while I’m sound asleep, the clock will quietly fall back from 1:59 daylight saving time to 1:00 standard time—offering a gift of an entire hour, making that Sunday 25 hours long.
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Daylight saving time is a temporal convention in which the clock moves forward an hour in spring and backward an hour in autumn. When it ends—as on this Sunday—we revert to standard time—and regain the hour of sleep we had lost in March.
Benjamin Franklin is often credited for having come up with the notion of changing our routines to get more out of the daylight.
In 1784, while living in France, he wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to the Journal de Paris—later published as An Economical Project—proposing that Parisians could save candles by rising earlier and soaking up more morning sunlight.
He calculated that people in Paris wasted mountains of tallow and wax because they stayed up long after sunset and slept until noon.
His humorous remedy?
“Every morning, as soon as the sun rises, let all the bells in every church be set ringing … let cannon be fired in every street to wake the sluggards effectively. Let a tax be levied on every window provided with shutters to keep out the sunlight.”
Franklin’s essay was satire, not policy, but the spirit of his suggestion lived on—not in regard to candles, but to clocks.
Germany set the trend. To conserve coal, it adopted daylight saving time as an austerity measure in 1916—the first nation to do so. The U.S. followed in 1918, but repealed it the next year after World War I ended. It was reinstated in 1942 during World War II. It was made permanent by law in 1966 (the Uniform Time Act) and has remained—though it has been updated several times since.
Can we truly “save” daylight? Of course, not—no more than we can wrap the Martian moon Deimos in a garbage bag. By moving our clocks forward, we agree to change the way we experience daylight, wrote novelist Karen Thompson Walker in The New York Times. We don’t change daylight itself.
The argument in favor of resetting the clocks is that it reduces our energy consumption. When the clock moves an hour ahead in spring, we’re forced to get out of bed an hour earlier. We flip on our lamps because it’s still dark out. Even though we burn electricity in crepuscular dawns, the energy we expend at sunrise is more than offset by what we save at sunset because brighter evenings reduce the need for artificial illumination.
That’s the logic behind daylight saving time. But do we need it?
As we edge towards summer, the sun rises progressively earlier and sets progressively later. Near the solstice in late June, daylight can last more than 15 hours in much of the continental U.S.—sunrise around 5:30 AM and sunset around 8:30 PM.
We switch on the lights by gauging the brightness around us. So, even without daylight saving time, we would still respond to sunlight, not the clock.
In some corners of the world, it’s not so helpful to tell time by the clock: there’s a wide gap between standard time (clock time) and solar time (the position of the sun in the sky and at which 12:00 PM is observed when the sun is at the zenith).
In most regions, the sun rises and sets after the standard time. For example, In Xinjiang, northwestern China, the sun reaches its zenith (and its brightest) nearly three hours after 12:00 PM. In Assam, India’s northeastern state, the reverse happens. The sun rises much before the standard time. At 4:30 AM, it’s very bright out, though the clocks insist that the day hasn’t yet begun.
Nothing announces summer quite like the jingle of Mister Softee drifting down the block. In winter, I measure the season by the breath that clouds the glass.