Witt: The insanity of time change
Published 10:23 am Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Well, the country has just completed its semi-annual insanity of changing the hour of its clocks once again.
Why we continue to engage in this madness is virtually impossible to explain.
Maybe at one time it made some sense. It was originally sold as a way to save energy or as a way for farmers to take advantage of longer daylight hours … or some such nonsense, but more specifically to get people out and shopping for longer periods of the day.
Of course, there never was any longer daylight, it was always just a method of changing one’s perception of the periods of daylight and darkness.
Those periods have remained virtually unchanged since long before man even kept track of time by use of a vertical stick impaled in the ground and watching its shadow move about.
Everyone realizes time on Earth is determined by the period of rotation of the planet, approximately 24 hours to make one complete rotation.
Virtually everyone also realizes the length of time any part of the planet receives daylight is dependent not on what our clocks say, but on the tilt of the Earth and its relationship to the sun as it circumnavigates that star through a period of one year (the year being sufficiently inexact that it requires a quadrennial adjustment of one extra day).
Mankind has progressed in his ability to measure time to the extent it can now be measured by the vibration cycle of cesium atoms (or maybe something even more exact by now), and yet, at least here in the United States, we subject ourselves to the ludicrous practice of moving our clock hands twice a year and pretend we are affecting the length of daylight and darkness.
Every year there are those who bemoan this archaic practice and even legislators who listen to those outcries and offer legislation to remove their state or municipality from clock adjustments.
There are isolated areas within the United States where the practice is not followed. Hawaii and Arizona have not observed Daylight Saving Time since 1967 and 1968 respectively.
If one looks at a world map of time zones, it is easy to see the foolishness of the concept of such zones. Oh, the idea is fine and was originally developed because the faster transportation available through the railroads required a more precise way of setting arrival and departure times.
If the concept simply stated a time zone would follow a line of longitude, all would be well. But, looking at a time zone map of today, it’s easy to see a good idea gone awry, with huge jigs and jags in the zones, many well beyond the intended longitude line.
The simple method of the time zones set them to occur 7.5 degrees each side of the longitude, 0 longitude being through Greenwich, England. Mainland USA contains four time zones; China, which geographically spans five time zones, observes only one time throughout the entire country. Even the International Date Line, which should logically be a straight line, running north-south in the Pacific Ocean, jogs around certain island groups which wanted to either be a day early or a day late.
Recent studies have even suggested changing the clocks is unhealthy, with potential links of doing so with an increase in heart attacks.
This practice has been in effect for more than 100 years and virtually no benefits of it have ever been demonstrated, so let’s just do away with it as Massachusetts is in the process of doing, and those who want an extra hour of daylight can just console themselves by getting up an hour earlier and let the rest of humanity off the hook for changing their clocks twice a year.
Which, incidentally, if one has multiple clocks in the house, can never get all of them on the same time anyway.
Chuck Witt is a retired architect and a lifelong resident of Winchester. He can be reached at chuck740@bellsouth.net.