Daylight Saving Time and the Missing Hour.
This article is being brought to you by a missing hour. It wasn’t easy getting the article ready with a missing hour. It was running behind, almost an hour behind. If only there was a way to get that hour back!
That was the sarcasm bit, all about a missing hour. It reads slightly cranky, (one less hour of sleep) and that was intentional, not the effect of the missing hour. So what gives with this missing hour? And why are we still doing it year after year?
Daylight Saving Time defined.
The main purpose of Daylight Saving Time is to make better use of daylight. We change our clocks during the summer months, to move an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening.
This idea was first talked about in the states by Benjamin Franklin in 1784. The idea was to conserve candles. He estimated a considerable candle savings by adding daylight to the day. Seems logical.
An added benefit to extra daylight is more time to get the daily chores done. This was also important in the days when farming was a way of life for most families, but isn’t the main reason for DST.
How to Escape DST.
Move to the equator. Or Arizona. And there are some parts of Australia that don’t observe DST. The main reason is the time change wouldn’t make a noticeable difference.
Arizona gets pretty hot and there’s never any concern with the ground freezing, so they’re not looking to add daylight hours and more heat to the day.
There is also China and Hawaii for DST avoidance consideration. China, despite it’s geographic size, is located in a single time zone making DST impractical. The same goes for Hawaii, not it’s size but it’s location, and that makes DST impractical there as well.
The manipulation of time at higher latitudes has little effect on daily life. Or so they say.
The Missing Hour
Spring ahead and fall back. Best way to remember which way the clock needs to be set when the DST comes to swipe the hour. Or, much later on, give the hour back.
The fall back mantra, is the golden one that returns that missing hour, therefore, spring ahead is the one where the hour goes missing. This is starting to feel a little bit like a physics lesson.
There is a wealth of information on this topic, including the history of countries around the world that have experimented with year round DST. It can be found on this link.
It looks like that missing hour is right where it belongs, for the time being. March 13th, it will vanish again, and the good news is there will be longer days to bask in that gorgeous sunshine!