Fall Back, Spring for Words©2011 Lynn Rebuck

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

Some people adjust quickly to the switch to Daylight Saving Time. It usually takes me six months .  My body resists the sudden shift. The name even confuses me.  How does daylight save time?  Is it time for us to contribute to our savings? In other countries, they simply call it “Summer Time.” Go figure.

While most people are aware that the whole concept that daylight could be saved was invented by that irrepressible inventor, Benjamin Franklin, many are unaware that he conceived of the idea after pulling a candle-lit almost-all-nighter in France.  

Mr. “a penny saved is a penny earned” Franklin finally crashed at 3 or 4 a.m. after being totally amazed by a new invention being demonstrated on QVC called the “oil lamp”. At 6 a.m. he was so startled by the sunlight streaming into his room that he reasoned, in the midst of his sleep deprivation, that a drop of wax saved is a drop of waxed earned.

Interestingly enough (or not, you decide), Franklin first proposed his radical idea in a letter to the editor.  He reasoned that tons of wax and livre (which is books, money, or chopped liver according to my very vague French dictionary) could be saved if the Laissez-faire French would stop sleeping until noon.

He humorously suggested that a cannon be set off on the streets each morning to jolt people to wakefulness.  Not a bad idea, especially for today’s hard-to-wake teens.  He also suggested a financial penalty for homeowners whose residences had shutters to keep the sunlight out.  Today that would be the equivalent of a Levelor levy.

But the time-change concept didn’t go straight from Franklin’s quill to instantaneous world-wide acceptance.  People were amused but resistant.  In 1907, William Willet, an English builder and the first one with a “Save the Daylight” bumper sticker, proposed the time change but with a more humane transition than the sudden one-hour shift: on each of four consecutive Sundays in April, at 2 a.m., set the clock forward a mere twenty minutes and back in like fashion in the fall.

He was ahead of his time.  About twenty minutes ahead. The idea was mocked, dismissed, and eventually passed by legislators.  Those time lobbyists were very persuasive.

People used to rely on local time from a town clock like we rely today on the time from our infallible computer screens (mine is still set on Pacific Time).

In the United States the entity that actually drove hardest for the standardization of time was the transportation industry.   That was so that in the future airline passengers would eventually know just how late their flights were.  To get from one location to another back then often required stopping at more locations with different times than flying on Southwest does today.

Times have certainly changed since Franklin and Willet. We now efficiently light our homes in the evenings with energy-saving 40-inch HD screens tuned to QVC, where tonight they are demonstrating lava lamps.  I’ll probably be awake until 3 or 4 a.m. 

Lynn Rebuck claims the deadline for this column was 2 p.m. Pacific Time. Email Lynn@LynnRebuck.com (c) 2011 Lynn Rebuck

Tags: Benjamin Franklin, comedy, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, humor, QVC, Seasons, time change
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