5/25/2023 0 Comments Daylife savingsIn 1918, Easter Sunday fell on March 31, which led to a lot of latecomers to church services. On March 19, 1918, Woodrow Wilson signed the Calder Act requiring Americans to set their clocks to standard time less than two weeks later, on March 31, they would be required to abandon standard time and push their clocks ahead by an hour for the nation’s first experiment with daylight saving. The patriotic rationale for daylight saving went like this: Shifting one hour of available light from the very early morning (when most Americans were asleep) would reduce the demand for domestic electrical power used to illuminate homes in the evening, which would spare more energy for the war effort. But Congress also tacked on the legal mandate for the four continental time zones. From patriotic duty to moneymaking schemeĪ law requiring Americans to lose an hour was confounding enough. And despite fanatical opposition from the farm lobby, so would the United States. Within a year, Great Britain followed suit. Then, in 1916, Germany suddenly adopted the British idea in hopes of conserving energy for its war effort. While proponents argued that shoving clocks ahead during summer months would reduce energy consumption and encourage outdoor recreation, the opposition won out. The clocks were calm for almost 30 years, but for an annual debate in the British Parliament over whether to pass a Daylight Saving Act. In 1883, the economic clout of the railroads allowed them to replace sun time with standard time with no legislative assistance and little public opposition. They needed synchronized, predictable station times for arrivals and departures, so they proposed splitting up the globe into 24 time zones. To railroad companies around the world, that wasn’t acceptable. Making the trains run on timeįor centuries people set their clocks and watches by looking up at the sun and estimating, which yielded wildly dissimilar results between (and often within) cities and towns. But it has proven to be a fantastically effective retail spending plan. Despite its name, daylight saving has never saved anyone anything. It’s absurd – and fitting – that a century later, opponents and supporters of daylight saving are still not sure exactly what it does. Instead, relying on the same overly optimistic math that led the original proponents of daylight saving to predict vast energy savings, crisper farm products harvested before the morning dew dried and lessened eye strain for industrial workers, Florida legislators are lauding the benefits of putting “more sunshine in our lives.” The cost of rescheduling international and interstate business and commerce hasn’t been calculated. If approved by the federal government, this will effectively move Florida’s residents one time zone to the east, aligning cities from Jacksonville to Miami with Nova Scotia rather than New York and Washington, D.C. One hundred years after Congress passed the first daylight saving legislation, lawmakers in Florida this week passed the “Sunshine Protection Act,” which will make daylight saving a year-round reality in the Sunshine State.
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