Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time

by Michael Downing

Hardcover, 2005

Collection

Publication

Counterpoint (2005), 192 pages

Description

Michael Downing is obsessed with Daylight Saving, the loopy idea that became the most persistent political controversy in American history. Almost one hundred years after Congressmen and lawmakers in every state first debated, ridiculed, and then passionately embraced the possibility of saving an hour of daylight, no one can say for sure why we are required by law to change our clocks twice a year. Who first proposed the scheme? The most authoritative sources agree it was a Pittsburgh industrialist, Woodrow Wilson, a man on a horse in London, a Manhattan socialite, Benjamin Franklin, one of the Caesars, or the anonymous makers of ancient Chinese and Japanese water clocks. Spring Forward is a portrait of public policy in the 20th century, a perennially boiling cauldron of unsubstantiated science, profiteering masked as piety, and mysteriously shifting time-zone boundaries. It is a true-to-life social comedy with Congress in the leading role, surrounded by a supporting cast of opportunistic ministers, movie moguls, stockbrokers, labor leaders, sports fanatics, and railroad execs.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member bragan

This is a history of Daylight Saving Time -- technically it's not called Daylight Savings time -- throughout the world and most particularly in the United States. And ye gods, what a complicated history it is. I always thought the whole thing was a bit of a mess, but apparently I didn't know the

half of it. Downing, however, does, and he carefully catalogs all the debates and the controversies, all the laws and the lawbreaking, all the various clock-altering measures and half-measures and sheer temporal chaos that people have come up with in the name of "saving" something that you can't actually change the amount of, anyway. To be honest, there were places where I found it all a little confusing, which is probably part of the point, and perhaps a little tedious, which probably wasn't. But it's not badly written, and it is extremely informative, especially in the way it clears up a few popular misconceptions about Daylight Saving Time. For one thing, it's not fair to blame the farmers. In fact, farmers were dead set against the idea from the beginning, and actually succeeded in getting the law repealed in the US for a while, sort of. It seems that cows don't pay attention to clocks, and you can't harvest your crops until the dew has dried off them, no matter what time you're pretending it is. Oh, and the idea that "saving" daylight saves energy? It may or may not actually be true. Nobody really knows, including lots of people who are positive they do, but the available data doesn't look good.

I will say that although I've never been happy with this arbitrary messing about with clocks -- to put it very mildly -- I've come out of this book actually feeling a bit better about it. Not because anything in the book made it seem like a good idea to me, but just because I now realize that it could be so very, very much worse.

Show Less

1 more

LibraryThing member Devil_llama

A review of the chaos of time, and the struggle over daylight time vs sun time. The author does a good job creating a sense of havoc and chaos, and brings wit to bear to the various arguments and counterarguments in the topic of Daylight Saving Time (DST). He details some of the characters on both

sides of the DST argument, and the funny, outrageous arguments being made for or against changing the clocks. He details the chaos that was time in general prior to the railroad insisting on standardized time, and how hard it has been to get a standard time for the country, let alone for the world. I had no idea this battle was brewing so heavily in my lifetime. The author also gets tantalizingly close to one fact that is ignored, or not believed, by nearly everyone: the concept of time, divided into hours, with noon being the moment the sun is highest in the sky, is not based in any empirical reality, but simply human convenience. Time as we battle over it doesn't actually exist outside of human minds, and it doesn't really matter what we call any given time. He also touches on, but not quite explores, the idea that there is a certain arbitrary nature to assuming you need to go to work at 9 in the morning and get off at 5, or any other human-derived schedule. Time, in short, is merely a habit. The need to agree on time is accepted in many areas, especially in our global society, and he details some of the mayhem that has ensued from the chaos of time calculations in various corners of the globe, and the struggle to get everyone to agree on what time it is. A fine book, written with humor and style, though one or two places where I noticed him mistaking whether the time was ahead or behind in a given situation. It simply confirms how difficult it can be to keep up. Highly recommended.

Show Less

Fewer

Language

English

Amazon.com

Page: 0.2467 seconds