The other day I was Skyping with some friends from Calgary. I have always kind of laughed at Daylight Savings Time, I mean there's still the same amount of time in a day no matter what people do. The sun rises, it's up for so long and it sets.
Being from Saskatchewan and having gone to school in Lethbridge I continually complained about the fall back and spring forward, it seemed an annoying inconvenience. Just let time be. After all my one friend always said "If you cut the top off a blanket and sew it to the bottom the blanket doesn't get longer." Time, however, isn't tangible like a blanket because it's actually not real.
However, as I sat on my deck Skyping with them the sun all of a sudden disappeared and I was left in darkness. Currently Alberta is in Daylight Savings Time, so although our clocks both read, 9 p.m., or so, it was still light out for them, just beginning to dim.
Now because they were in Daylight Savings Time our clocks read the same time, but if Alberta didn't "spring forward" earlier in the year it would have technically been 8 p.m. So by manipulating time, which is a human construct in a sense, they created an extra hour of sunlight in the evening during the summer.
To be honest I was always skeptical of Daylight Savings my entire life, and I guess that comes with having grown up in Saskatchewan where it doesn't seem necessary like it does everywhere else. It was neat, however, to finally understand what Daylight Savings really is.
Looking into it further, ancient civilizations actually used to practice a variation of Daylight Savings. For Roman engineers the water clocks they built required different scales depending on the different month, while Benjamin Franklin is credited with the invention of modern Daylight Savings even though it has only been used for approximately 100 years.
Franklin wrote an essay in 1784 calling for time change allowing for people to rise earlier in the morning as a way to utilize more sunlight in the evening and save on candle costs. Today it would save on electricity costs. Although he made a compelling argument and there was interest surrounding his proposal nothing really developed from it.
Franklin's argument was unbeknownst to William Willett in 1905, but he made an argument to move the clocks forward by 20 minutes each Sunday in April, then move them back by the same amount each Sunday in September. Though a bill was drafted in 1909 it was shot down mostly by farmers and others who opposed the idea.
It was actually during World War I that Daylight Savings Time would spread globally. Germany first implemented it by turning their clocks forward at 11 p.m. on April 30, 1916. They were saving fuel for the war efforts by using less artificial light in the day. This spread quickly through countries at war as the reasoning was sound.
After WWI, however, many countries gave up the practice and it wasn't until World War II that countries needed to once again save resources for their troops.
In the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented "War Time" creating "Eastern War Time," "Central War Time," and "Pacific War Time." When the war concluded with Japan surrendering in August of 1945 these time zones were relabelled using "Peace Time."
Britain, in an attempt to maximize the sunlight, used "Double Summer Time" jumping forward two hours during the summer and one hour in the winter.
Now, I know Daylight Savings Time is something that seems to set Saskatchewan apart from most other provinces and I'm not saying we should switch. I just thought it was extremely interesting to see that it was in fact a reality.
In a sense it makes you wonder how time zones were created and if they were properly established. I know navigation at sea in the late-1700s came with the creation of latitude and longitude, which sort of led to time zones; but, today time seems like such a set thing although it is actually an abstract in the sense it is malleable by people changing it to benefit us.
