Time change requires adjustment

Daylight Saving Time y’all. Am I right?

Sorry, that’s how millennials talk sometimes. We make random statements and ask for agreement without really explaining what we’re talking about.

At any rate, Sunday we all took the time to “spring forward” – at least, I hope you did. Otherwise you have probably been wondering why you’ve been late to everything all week.

Personally, I love Daylight Saving Time. That’s probably a product of having a 45-minute commute home to the Lawrence/Morgan county line. Now it’s daylight the whole drive home, or at least most of it, even those evenings when I have late coverage like city council – as compared to Thursday, when Franklin County’s partnership awards banquet meant I arrived home well after dark.

More daylight hours makes it feel like I can actually have an evening after work – rather than feeling like I just ought to head straight off to bed.

Then again, I’m a glass-half-full type of person most of them time, so my opinion probably isn’t to be relied upon. Other people aren’t fans of “springing forward” the way I am. You “lose” an hour, it’s true – that’s why my husband doesn’t like it. We already try to get to bed at an early hour, usually between 9-9:30 p.m., and Saturday he had to go to bed even earlier to avoid “losing” that hour of rest. Ah, the sacrifices we have to make for beauty sleep.

Of course, some people object to the time change on principle, and that I understand. As the old saying goes, only a foolish person would think he could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it onto the bottom and have a longer blanket.

According to timeanddate.com, the time change has an illustrious history. US inventor and politician Benjamin Franklin first proposed the concept of DST in 1784, but modern Daylight Saving Time was apparently first suggested in 1895 by a man named George Vernon Hudson, an entomologist from New Zealand, who presented a proposal for a two-hour daylight saving shift. It was first implemented in Ontario, Canada, in 1908, and Germany was the first to observe DST country-wide – with the rationale being “to minimize the use of artificial lighting in order to save fuel for the war effort during World War I.” According to timeanddate.com, “Many countries reverted back to standard time after World War I, and it wasn’t until the next World War that DST made its return in most of Europe.” In the U.S. in 1918, “fast time” was first introduced “when President Woodrow Wilson signed it into law to support the war effort during World War I. The initiative was sparked by Robert Garland, a Pittsburgh industrialist who had encountered the idea in the UK. Today he is often called the ‘Father of Daylight Saving.’”

Then it was repealed, then it was reinstituted, then for decades there was no uniform rule across the nation for DST. Can you imagine? In 1966 Congress established the Uniform Time Act, but even that wasn’t the end of the story. I’ll leave you to research the rest for yourself, but suffice it to say, it’s not just among us modern-day folks that the time change has been less than universally accepted.

What are your thoughts? Do you like the time change? Do you think it’s still a beneficial construct, or has it outlived its usefulness? I’d be glad to hear your opinion.

James is managing editor for the Franklin County Times. You can reach her at alison.james@fct.wpengine.com.