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Writer's pictureROGER H. TALL, M.D.

CHANGING TIMES




Last week we got to pretend that November 6, 2022, lasted for 25 hours. Someone named this oxymoron daylight saving time (DST). It might as well be called daylight stealing time, because that extra hour was stolen from us four months ago when March 13th only lasted for 23 hours. The switch was made at 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning when most of us were sleeping. When we got up, we had to change the time on our clocks -- if we remembered. My early bird, perpetual motion machine, ten-month-old grandson, JW, thinks this is fine because he is not on the clock. He runs on hormonal time and has his own internal clock -- powered by hormones. His mother is not so thrilled. Her little eager beaver wakes up every day at 5 a.m., thinking it is 6:00 a.m. As we push our Circadian rhythms into a new schedule, we feel the internal protest as we try to catch up to our clocks. All of this nonsense made me wonder who was to blame for hatching this up in the first place. A common misconception is that it was Benjamin Franklin's fault. He did publish his proverb, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,” in a letter in the Journal de Paris, while he was an American envoy to France. This 1784 satire also suggested taxing window shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. However, precise schedules and standardization of time were unknown in his day, so Ben is off the hook. One hundred years later, the idea of saving daylight was actually conceived by a bug collector in New Zealand and a golfer in England. They never met, but independently published papers describing the idea of resetting clocks as a way to extend their evenings. They obviously had too much time on their hands.


George Hudson was first. He was an entomologist in New Zealand and presented his paper to The Wellington Philosophical Society in 1898. His shift work job gave him the freedom to collect insects and led him to value after-hours daylight. Nine years later, an Englishman named William Willett, published his paper in 1907, proposing the name, daylight saving time. Willett did not approve of people wasting sunshine by sleeping through mornings after sunrise — he especially did not like it when he had to cut his golf round short at dusk when he ran out of daylight. Canada became the first country to actually use the idea. In 1908, Thunder Bay, Ontario, located on Lake Superior, became the first city in the world to start using DST. In 1914, WWI brought the need for standardization of time to the allies, who adopted DST. Some countries dropped DST after the war, leaving the rest of us to change our clocks without them. Some of us are happier with this than others. As for me, whenever I have to reset all my clocks, it makes me want to dig George Hudson up and punch him in the beak.


Last year, the U.S. Senate passed Senator Marco Rubio’s bill, the Sunshine Protection Act. Nothing keeps me from sleeping like worrying about a bunch of sunshine running around without protection. This would make daylight saving time permanent starting in 2023. The Senate approved the measure unanimously by voice vote. The House of Representatives, which has held a committee hearing on the matter, must still pass the bill before sending it on to President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. for signature --- if someone reminds him. Keep your fingers crossed. Ever vigilant, RT





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