Did Benjamin Franklin Invent Daylight Saving Time? 395
An anonymous reader writes "While living in Paris, Ben Franklin was struck by how many hours of daylight were being wasted to sleep during the summer months. He wrote an open letter to a Parisian journal lamenting the wasted expenditures on candlewax, and presented his back-of-the-quillpad estimates of the cost savings if the entire population arose an hour or two earlier. However, Franklin did not specifically mention moving the clocks ahead; instead, he suggested official means for enforcement (rationing the sale of candlewax to families) and encouragement (ringing church bells at sunrise). The clock-shifting technique which we know and love was credited to the New Zealander George Vernon Hudson, who proposed it in 1895. DST was first widely adopted by warring countries during World War I as a way of conserving coal needed for military purposes. This launched a debate over DST's usefulness that continues to the present day (particularly by people stumbling about in their bathrooms). Of course, Franklin is also associated with other questionable ideas, including bifocals, lightning rods, electric current flowing from the positive to negative terminal, leaking official documents to fan opposition, and an independent United States of America."
New research suggests the daylight saving time change will lead to lower productivity tomorrow as the lost sleep makes workers more likely to slack (PDF).
if he did (Score:2, Insightful)
may he rot in hell ...
oh, that's right, he's in Philly... nevermind
When? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are we going to abolish the stupidity of the concept of Daylight Savings Time? It saves no daylight.
There will be a higher percentage of car crashes tomorrow due to people being awake an hour earlier. Then in fall, there will be higher suicides when there is suddenly, with no logical explanation to your circadian cycle, dramatically less sunlight.
This is an abomination and really has a horrible effect on me and other each year.
It needs to go away with other anachronisms. I mortally detest it.
Increased traffic accidents on Monday (Score:5, Insightful)
Sleep-journal.com [sleep-journal.com]: "Results: There was a significant increase in accidents for the Monday immediately following the spring shift to DST (t=1.92, P=0.034). There was also a significant increase in number of accidents on the Sunday of the fall shift from DST (P0.002)."
Get rid of DST. Arizona has it right (no DST). Doesn't help that the whole world doesn't even follow the DST change at the same time.
Re:Being in New England... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like your area just needs to fix its timezone, or failing that happening just adjust the locale business hours to something more appropriate to the region.
Re:When? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are we going to abolish the stupidity of the concept of Daylight Savings Time? It saves no daylight.
It is an effective way to keep the daylight hours after work, when productive things can be done, rather than before work when nothing useful can be done because you're just going to have to go to work in a short time. We're stuck with the kludgy method of flipping clocks back and forth because we, as a society, are still wedded to the stupid 8-to-5 workday and the bankers that hold everyone else by the balls with their hours.
Full disclosure: I love DST and wish we'd stay on it all year. Light early in the morning is useless to me; I'm already at work in a windowless office by the time the sun comes up. I like having a lot of time to do things after work, and I don't get that at all in the winter--the sun's setting when I leave. If DST went on all year, I'd at least have a little light to do things first.
low standards (Score:5, Insightful)
The standard for "invention" has dropped a long way hasn't it. The whole "getting up with the sunrise" idea from antiquity was the original dailylight savings time. It was only once people started working in dungeons ...er ... factories that schedules started being different from work when you can see what you're doing. You can't forget something and then remember it and replace it with a less precise system and call it an invention.
You'd think slashdot readers would recognize it... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pretty clear Franklin was trolling big time with that letter.
Re:When? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, saying that we should stay on DST all year is idiotic. We should just do things an hour earlier.
Re:When? (Score:4, Insightful)
It made a tiny bit of sense in the old days for cities before electric power. But it made no sense for rural areas. Now that we have this fancy thing called electricity, the entire concept is just asinine.
Except of course, they did not do Daylight Savings Time until after the development of electric lights.
I don't really agree with Ben here. (Score:5, Insightful)
As the summary mentions, Ben's argument was basically that "early to bed and early to rise" saved energy. Getting up with the sun and going to sleep earlier in the evening reduced the need for lamp oil. And while we use electricity instead of lamp oil, this argument is still used today.
However, when you consider that lighting is becoming more and more efficient and most of our personal energy consumption now goes to heating and cooling, the picture changes. Since the Earth takes time to warm and cool each day, the daily temperature cycle lags behind the sun by a few hours. Getting up early in the winter just means more energy spent heating your home and office, and working late in the day during summer means high A/C bills.
Plus, most people want some daylight time outside the typical 8-5 work window. There's no reason to line up the work day with daylight hours; these days, most people are cooped up in office buildings and don't really care whether it's light or dark out. And commuting during sunrise or sunset is dangerous, so that's another good reason to offset the workday from the sun cycle.
Finally, studies have shown that a period of bright light, preferably sunlight, is important for our health during the winter months. So yet again it makes no sense to align the workday with the daylight cycle, since commuters at northern latitudes only see a bit of dawn and dusk during their commute and are stuck indoors during the bright part of the day.
While it may be a bit extreme, I think the ideal solution is to start the workday a couple hours past sunrise in the winter and a couple hours before sunrise in the summer. You'll be active during the warmest hours of winter and cooler hours in summer, you'll have free time during daylight hours year round, you'll commute to work in bright sunlight during the winter, and you'll avoid staring into the sun while commuting most of the year. Of course, nobody would want to a several-hour time change, so it would be better to spread it out: Lose a minute every night for half the year, then gain a minute each night for the other half. In addition, there could also be a couple jumps during the year to help avoid commuting at dawn/dusk. Getting people to accept waking up before dawn during summer and having sunset in the middle of the afternoon during winter might still take some work, but I think it would be safer, healthier, and more efficient for everyone.
Re:A funny quote about daylight savings time (Score:4, Insightful)
Slackers will use any excuse to slack off (Score:4, Insightful)
New research suggests the daylight saving time change will lead to lower productivity tomorrow as the lost sleep makes workers more likely to slack
Slackers will use any excuse available to slack off
If they can't blame it on daylight saving time, they will blame it on something else
On the other hand, those who work hard will always work hard, come what may
Re:Being in New England... (Score:4, Insightful)
just adjust the locale business hours to something more appropriate to the region.
Not just that, Home Depot even has summer hours and winter hours. Oh, wait, that's impossible to do without government mandating it - I must be confused.
Re:Being in New England... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why not get rid of the 9-5 and operate 24/7? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the country is producing enough to feed everyone and you have too few jobs and too many workers why not:
a) work shorter hours?
b) work the same hours, but give everyone a basic income so that the jobless don't need jobs to survive?
If the country is not producing enough to feed everyone, then it's screwed in the long run. You can hide it by going into debt or other tricks, but the real solution is to figure out a way to increase productivity.
People with no hope of finding jobs stealing stuff from me does not increase productivity.
How to make a longer blanket... (Score:3, Insightful)
An old Indian chief once said that only the United States government believes that by cutting a foot off the top of a blanket and sewing it on the bottom, you get a longer blanket.
Re:DST is good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why not get rid of the 9-5 and operate 24/7? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the US, as long as benefits - esp. health care - are connected to "full-time" employment as a binary relationship, this won't happen. It's in the interest of the employer to have as few people as possible at "full-time", and low-wage jobs are notorious for cutting off workers at 34.5 hours, or whatever the threshold is for the state.
I would GLADLY work 3/4 the hours for 3/4s the pay and 3/4s the health insurance, but it doesn't work like that.
If we had "single-payer" health insurance, you'd see a LOT more variety in working schedules, and we'd have fuller employment; the same number of hours would be worked (disallowing any network effects from single-payer insurance) but more people would be busy working them.