Slashdot Mirror
Did Benjamin Franklin Invent Daylight Saving Time?
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).
One of my childhood heroes - I'm not surprised that he would have questioned the custom of keeping the same hours throughout the year as the sun rises and sets at different times.
My favourite story about him: Thomas Jefferson would not allow Franklin to work on the Declaration of Independence because he feared Franklin would put too many jokes in it.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
may he rot in hell ...
oh, that's right, he's in Philly... nevermind
I like going home after work and still having daylight. I can go out for a run, have a picnic, and not be fearful of vampires.
I always await DST with bated breath every year.
And I rue its passing every fall
We are so far east in the Eastern time zone, which goes all the way from Western Indiana to Maine, that we should actually be in the Atlantic time zone with the Canadian Maritime provinces.
--
GMO
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.
This is really bad. I woke up this morning and noticed that is was noon instead of 11am like it should be. They fucking stole an hour from my life! Sure some might say I'll get it back next time we adjust the clock, but what if I don't make it to that time? It's gone, this is completely horrible.
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.
This "electricity" is merely a fad and will come to nothing. Ha, and those bifocal things will cause the innocent wearer to become cross-eyed. Such dangerous radicals are not to be suffered in the King's lands!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
That is when summer time starts for the vast majority of sufferers.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Here in Saskatchewan we are pretty much the only province in Canada that doesn't switch time in regards to DST. So in effect we are like Arizona and don't switch.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
I read a quote somewhere (Google says it's of Navajo origin) that changed the way I thought about daylight savings time. It went something like this:
"Daylight Savings Time is the equivalent of cutting off the bottom of a blanket and sewing it on to the top because your blanket is too short."
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Franklin may have stumbled, literally after frequenting Paris houses of ill repute in the wee hours, but the current national insanity stems from mass hysteria and panic during World War 1 and 2 then transformed for the Cold War baby boomers.
All of this "savings" is all a damn bloody myth.
C.G.P. Grey did a swell video on this subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aWtseb2-4
Frankly, the system as is a chaotic mess. I find myself more and more often tempted to state HH:MM p/a GMT. It just seems like something that was good in theory about two hundred years ago, but now? Confusion. There is a reason standard time for trains considered such a great advance. DST now seems like a step backwards.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
I'm off all week. A lot of others feel the same way every time this comes around. Their internal clock is set to what they have been used to and now it's off by an hour and it takes a week or more to get it correct again.
There is no use for DST.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Comrade Putin used abolishing DST as a platform to run under in this recent election... Seems to have worked out well for him
The answer to all your problems
When will America learn, they did not invent everything? Please stop hunting for reasons that they did.
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.
It's pretty clear Franklin was trolling big time with that letter.
Is that the powers that be are still scared of the dark. Seriously though, we live in a time where we have electricity and light bulbs. If you're that uncomfortable with "losing daylight", grab a goddamn flashlight. It isn't fucking sorcery.
My respect for him just took a nosedive.
DST is stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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
I didn't realize he postulated (or invented) the flow of electrons incorrectly!
FYI, just to clarify for all you non electrically inclined folks out there, electrons flow from the negative terminal (where a surplus of electrons are, hense the negative charge) to the positive terminal (where there is a lack of electrons.)
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
Let's not forget Franklin as a visionary of the Free and Open Source movement also.
He refused to patent the pot belly stove and lighting rod (and probably lost what in today's dollars would be millions).
If you think productivity will go down tomorrow, wait and see what happens on the 22nd. That's when the new Angry Birds comes out.
Obviously, Ben Franklin didn't invent DST. Bobby Boucher's mother did... Ben Franklin is THE DEVIL!
The reasons for DST have changed several times in my lifetime: driver safety, encourage evening shopping, save energy, blah, blah, blah. Fact is it's just one more pointless government program that has outlived its usefulness, but will never die.
Watch Penn & Teller on the subject.
No.
My wife hates DST, so she looked into the actual law.
Here it is: The federal US government sets the days that the DST transition happens on. It's up to the individual states to go on DST or not.
So, you could work at a state level to just have your state not participate in it.
That's it.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
I see no reason why we maintain the inefficient and stupid 9-5 workday when we have way too few jobs for the amount of workers we have. I understand some people have to sleep in the night, but others could sleep in the day and it would result in less congestion on the roads as well.
We could be doing a 24 hour schedule but we still operate businesses and offices from 9-5. Why? I see no advantage.
If you want a visual explanation of the purpose and result of daylight saving time, check out this graph: Picasa Web Albums - Paul Nickerson
The purpose, as I understand it, is to make the sun not rise super early against the clock during the summer. The effect is that it reduces the range of sunrise times, while increasing the range of sunset times. In a way, it normalizes sunrises while amplifying sunsets.
Oh, and while we're at it, during a non-DST period, if the time zones were evenly split and straight with no regard to human geographic borders, then at the middle of the time zone, 12:00 (noon) would be the time that astronomical noon is (when the sun is highest in the sky), varying by about 20 minutes before and after noon. If you average all the astronomical noons over the course of a year in the middle of a time zone, then astronomical noon is at precisely 12:00. During DST, astronomical noon is moved to 1:00 pm (13:00)
I'm glad I have flexible work hours, because otherwise I'd be looking forward to a 10%-increased chance of having a heart attack tomorrow or the day after. So... if there are 2 million heart attacks per year in the US, I guess that means several hundred extra heart attacks just due to this effect?
It might seem like an esoteric discussion of productivity to people like ourselves, but if your job was to dig ditches each day you would be very happy to get up an hour earlier (and hence cooler) in the summertime.
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.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Singaporeans liked the concept of Daylight Saving so much that in 1982 they moved to it permanently. Geographically they should be UTC+7 but they currently work off UTC+8.
</ useless trivia >
Blog
Back in the days of Ben Franklin DST may have saved some candles, oil (for lamps) or gas.
In the early 20th century including both wars It saved electricity.
In the 21st century however its just stupid.
These days the majority of electricity is used for many other purposes besides lighting. The change to non-incandescent bulbs makes a significant power saving however.
Its no longer a 9-5 world. Many facilities have to operate 24 hours a day.
I work night shift (you insensitive clods)
In fall I end up having to work a 9 hr shift.
Last night I had a 7 hr shift
The only good thing was it meant that I could eat breakfast since I got home before sunrise. March 2-20th is the Month of the Fast in the religion I follow.
The average person probably wastes more than an hour in changing the clocks. Automatic setting of clocks (apart from computers and other connected devices that can have the software upgraded) didn't work because the govt changed the date DST starts and ends
Since it is election year, which candidates at a State or National level are in favor of repealing DST ?
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
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
...if he did, I have a lot less respect for the man.
Wasn't it Kim Jong-il who invented DST?
S
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Wait...what? Tomorrow?
Why didn't anyone tell me?
Shit! I have to get to bed!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
eliminate daylight savings time
Why is everyone so credulous?
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,
No you would be cooped up in an office during the warmest hours of winter and the cooler hours in summer. All your free time would be during the hottest hours of summer and the coldest hours of winter. That sounds like a good way for office buildings to save heating/cooling expenses, but would increase residential expenses, and make it less enjoyable to spend your free time outside.
For someone in the warmer latitudes, what I would like to see is the opposite. Leave winter hours as they are, and then shift the clock an hour later in the summer. That way you spend the hottest hours in the office, it will have cooled off by the time you are getting ready for bed, and you have time in the morning when it is cooler to spend outside before going to work.
There are plenty of banks that have adjusted hours to their communities. Some are open as late as 8 PM on selected days, Some are even open on (GASP) Saturdays.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
While not its current modern day equivalent, being a set amount of forward and back. The Ceaser had the Romans adjusting time for the seasons and the daylight shift as far back as 45BC. Old idea, with a new implementation, does not equal inventing it.
Any programmer knows that you don't redefine time itself - wrong answer.
Believe it or not, there is only "one single time zone" in China.
the sun would set at midnight in the summer. how awesome would that be?
if you have to go to work in the morning, it might as well be at the coldest darkest hour, since if something has to suck, it ought to suck completely
save the daylight for when you can really appreciate it: leisure time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Since many of us are interested in shifting clocks to allow for a more productive work day, and save lighting expenses, I propose a new twist to this system: the Workweek Saving Day. It is a very simple concept, really. Each Saturday night, instead of it becoming Sunday at the stroke of midnight, it becomes Monday. How awesome is that?! This way, we can all provide one more productive day of work to our beloved employers and do busy busy things to make the big cog-wheel turn. Come on li'l gipper, ya with me?!
I'm finding it difficult to parse out the titles - maybe in the future the poster looking for a list could suggest some tags
[author]pohl[[author]]
\\Gateway//
anything really - the 1220 posts are a little daunting by hand
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.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
Thomas Jefferson would not allow Franklin to work on the Declaration of Independence because he feared Franklin would put too many jokes in it
Awwww... what a spoilsport that Thomas Jefferson was
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Let's stop perpetuating this myth. Benjamin Franklin DID NOT invent electricity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwTADnsFrPA
Shifting time around to fit the daylight hours is a very old thing. The romans did this over 2000 years ago. Look up the Roman Water Clock. It tracked the seasons and shifted how long the daytime hours were according to the season. So in one form or another it is a very old concept. Sure Ben made the "modern" rule set for it but he didn't invent it.
DST is great. It's *standard* time that is the problem.
I stopped changing my clocks years ago, I just let everyone else be wrong.
There's so many ways to respond to this. Here, why don't I just bullet-point them.
* Quoth TFA: "While living in Paris, Ben Franklin was struck by how many hours of daylight were being wasted to sleep during the summer months." As someone that can never get enough, I can safely say that time spent sleeping can never be considered "wasted".
* If the human body was meant to get up an hour earlier in the summer, it would do it without our help.
* The point of daylight saving time, as far as I can tell, is: "Since the sun rises earlier in the summer, people end up sleeping through a full hour or more of daylight in the morning. So let's KICK 'EM ALL OUT OF BED AN HOUR EARLY AND PUT THAT DAYLIGHT TO GOOD USE, HEALTH EFFECTS BE DAMNED."
* Remember. You didn't just lose an hour of sleep last night. You're losing an hour of sleep every goddamn day for the next eight months.
* The joke's on us. When Benjamin Franklin proposed daylight saving time, he was joking
While we definitely can not account the invention of the modern DST to Ben Franklin (because it was invented by George Vernon Hudson, a New Zealander, and put to use by the British war-time effort), it is most satirical twist of history that his satirical writing from 1784 would be attributed to such feat. As if a joke had become the reality.
Indonesia, currently on three time zones, has just announced they're looking at all going to one. It would be UTC+8, which would suit businesses and me very well personally, on permanent DST. http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/government-mulling-one-time-zone-for-all-of-indonesia/503952
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
No kidding. As if the bit about firing cannon in the streets to make sure everyone woke up wasn't obvious enough for everyone...
DST is a stupid idea.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
So why don't we all go back to using sundials and adjust our water clocks accordingly?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
... standard time was abolished last year. Really.
He also invented internet, socks and parachutes. All while fighting ninjas.
how we won't need police, medical or infrastructure workers for 14 hours a day.
... to see so many people bitching about having to get up an hour early.
"Oooohhh my god, I'm a nerd. I live on Red Bull and Doritos, and the social norms to which I subscribe say it's cooler to stay up until 4AM and sleep until noon... ooooh and how ever will I get any girls unless I can be like the vampire dude in Twilight?"
Seriously, dorks. Get over yourselves and realize that the rest of the world is going to move on without you.
You get to provide the evidence. Dumbass.
Mama Boucher invented electricity. Ben Franklin is the Devil!
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Just move to Arizona. They don't ever use DST.
forms of control we must abide by.
Your lazy CEO has to make his billions while you're living in at your parents, not making enough to be attractive to any women, right?
If I ever meet Ben Freakin' Franklin, I am going to KICK HIS ASS!!!
As you say, "electric current" isn't the same thing as "electron flow."
This is easy enough to understand. Electrons may flow in the "opposite" way of electric current (to the degree that current has a direction), but they are also of negative charge. ...and two negatives make a positive.
When you see "5 mA" beside an arrow in a schematic, it means that when you have a positive current flowing at that point in the circuit, the arrow points in the direction of what becomes more positively charged. ...and since electrons are negatively charged, it means they're flowing in the direction opposite of the arrow. The "current" itself doesn't flow, only the electrons (or in rare cases the protons) flow.
However, it seems a lot of people can't help themselves. They hear the word "current" and think of a river of water, then quickly assume the "current" in question is the flow of electrons. It isn't. It's a "flow" of an abstract concept known as "charge," and once you realize that, you realize that if you decide you need to flip that arrow around so that it points in the direction of the electron flow, you also need to change the label beside the arrow from "+5 mA" to "-5 mA" so that the indicated measurement also reflects the negative charge of the electrons.
It's impossible to explain this to some people, however. For example, http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/ is a rather nice electronics text, except that they insist on drawing all current symbols so that the arrow points in the direction of electron flow, and yet they always indicate positive current measurements. I tried to explain to them once that the arrow is simply a polarity indicator -- that when you measure current, the red lead of your multimeter goes where the arrow points, and the black lead goes where the arrow doesn't point -- and thus they could keep their polarity measurement if they just negated the values next to the arrows. ...but it was no use. Once people decide they've corrected for a mistake of those unfortunately ignorant people of the past, there's no convincing them that the people of the past actually knew what the hell they were doing. So, instead, they simply told me that my meter was defective because it followed "traditional current" rather than "electron current." They seem to have hope that someday this "mistake" will be "corrected." However, the only logical way to do that would be to invert everything. Negative would become positive. Our American cars would become positive ground cars. Our PNP transistors would become NPN transistors. Suddenly P-channel MOSFETs would become affordable. ...but we're not going to do that because to invert everything for a cause that is just so irrelevant is insane. Electronics is just fine as it is, except that some people can't get it into their heads that they need to stop thinking about electrons and start thinking about charge.
Why don't we just go to DST, like we just did...and fucking leave it there from now on??
I hate the jumping back and forth....if DST is so much better, let's just leave it there....why can't we do that?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"Daylight Savings" is not a failed bank.
-- Bart Simpson
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Looks like the driver ran into a bridge and killed himself and one kid.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
We get our clocks adjusted and nobody loses any sleep. Everybody's happy*
* - except management who loses a day of work and perhaps workers who have to work anyway.
I regret to have to correct the OP, but electric current flows from the negative terminal to the positive terminal. A difference of potential exists because one side of the power source has an excess of electrons, which have a negative charge. The positive side doesn't really have a "positive" charge; simply spaces for said electrons to flow into...
I redact. Apparently I am not the only one confused on the issue. Current "flows" in the opposite direction of the movement of electrons, the electric "charge". So yes, CURRENT flows from positive to negative, while the electrons themselves move from the negative end towards the positive end (through the conductor, not the battery).
Not a bad idea IMHO, and it gets rid of the jarring reset of clocks twice a year:
http://www.standardtime.com/
In December, the sun rises at 9am and sets at 5pm. Unless you make daylight be 8-4 you're always going to have kids going one direction in the dark.
Pish, we'd have maximum sunlight if we always rose at dawn. But dawn time keeps changing. So if we redefined the day to start at dawn rather than midnite, and workday clocks were changed to always measure from there, the problem would be solved. (Yeah, penguins and polar bears WOULD have problems...)
Epitaph: At last! Root access!
Well, he did some good stuff that compensates for it.
What if we just ended it altogether, like so many other civilized countries already have?
Get the ball rolling, sign this petition: http://wh.gov/IFE
Living in a state without the DST, my biggest gripe is that I have to relearn my TV schedule.
Perhaps Franklin should of pushed for a converstion to Byzantine time..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_time
And just the other day the question "Who came up with the idea of DST?" was on Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?
The answer was Benjamin Franklin. So that's actually incorrect and the 5th graders got it wrong :)