Clock Wise?
By MICHAEL DOWNING
March 31, 2006; Page A16
This year is the 100th anniversary of the original British daylight saving law. It is also the last year Americans will spring forward. Thanks to the 2005 Energy Policy Act, daylight saving begins next year on the second Sunday of March. That's not spring; that's winter. Before you stick your finger in the face of your clock this weekend, think for a minute (it's deductible from the hour you lose). If this is such a boon to retail and recreation, why is Congress selling it as wintertime energy conservation?
William Willett proposed the idea of falsifying clock time in 1907. A golfer, hunter and horseman, Willett was trotting through London at dawn and noticed that windows were shuttered, blocking the summer sun. He wanted to shift that unused hour of daylight from morning to evening, when people could spend it on leisure, including increased "opportunities for rifle practice." Parliament repeatedly shouted down Willett's proposal. But in May 1916, with World War I underway, Germany adopted daylight saving, hoping later sunsets would reduce demand for electric illumination. In response, Britain immediately passed the 1916 Daylight Saving Act as an austerity measure. It wasn't easy to squeeze a lump of coal out of a clock, but this siphoned the fun from Willett's idea.
In the U.S., the first national daylight saving law took effect in March 1918. As a fuel-saver, it was a bust. But by September 1918, golf ball sales were up by 20% over the previous year's total. Baseball teams delayed game times by an hour so working people could attend. Racetracks followed suit. The national tennis association endorsed the legislation, and school sports programs expanded to fill the hour.
This was a law of unintended consequences. Since 1912, Congress had sided with farmers and rebuffed the Chamber of Commerce, which lobbied hard for daylight because big-city department stores knew people would shop after work if streets and storefronts were bright. Lured by elusive energy savings, Congress went with these city boys -- the "swivel-chair ornaments" decried by Kansas Rep. James Strong -- and risked the rural vote.
Farmers hated daylight saving. They used morning light to stimulate their dairy and dry dew off their cereal crops. When sunrise arrived an hour later, opening times for city markets didn't change. Farmers had one less hour to deliver the goods. Along with coal miners and clergymen, they complained that daylight saving severed our connection to the sun and God's time.
To appease the rural interests, Congress repealed daylight saving in 1919. Only another world war persuaded Congress to try it again. The Roosevelt administration claimed that War Time -- the year-round daylight saving that lasted from January 1942 until September 1945 -- reduced energy consumption by many kilowatts. This was harder to substantiate, however, than newspaper photographs of schoolchildren waiting for buses at trafficky intersections on dark winter mornings. And the farmers still hated it. Congress did not dare to pass a peacetime daylight saving law until 1966.
New York City was not cowed. Urban merchants had profited by daylight saving, and Wall Street wanted it after World War I because London had it, which put London six hours ahead of New York. Stock markets in both cities were open from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Without daylight saving, their trading hours didn't overlap, and they had no opportunity for arbitrage.
The New York City daylight saving ordinance went into effect in March 1920. Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago immediately sprang ahead. By 1930, 14 of the 16 cities with Major League Baseball teams were saving daylight. By 1965, of the 130 cities with populations over 100,000, 71 did and 59 did not. Each observant city set its own dates for springing forward and falling back. One airline reported 4,000 calls a day from customers trying to determine what time it was in the city of their destination. The U.S. Naval Laboratory dubbed us "the world's worst timekeeper." Congress finally stepped in and crafted the Uniform Time Act of 1966. This required every state to adopt a uniform six-month period of daylight saving or stick to Standard Time -- a wise compromise. Only Hawaii and Arizona ultimately resisted the clock change.
Then Richard Nixon took a wild swing at those elusive energy savings. Facing the OPEC oil embargo, the president mandated two years of year-round daylight saving. In late January 1974, sunrise times from West Texas to Michigan's Upper Peninsula ranged from 9:00 to 9:30 a.m., and after a couple of school-bus crashes, Congress radically scaled back Nixon's plan. But the damage was done. To win approval for his plan, Nixon had offered the 12 states with two time zones an exemption from Uniform Time. Indiana parlayed this privilege into chaos: 81 counties on Eastern Time, 76 with no daylight saving, and 11 counties on Central Time with daylight saving.
In a study of Nixon's failed experiment, the Department of Transportation concluded that wintertime daylight saving might have the potential to save 100,000 barrels of oil a day. In 1986, citing this potential as a guarantee, Congress extended daylight saving from six to seven months, and promised reductions in traffic fatalities and crime as well. These claims reminded North Carolina Rep. Charles Rose of a Native American's definition of daylight saving -- "the white man cutting an inch off the bottom of his blanket and sewing it to the top to make it longer."
The energy windfall from the 1986 extension never materialized. But the additional month of daylight did represent $400 million in sales and fees to the golf industry, $20 million in additional tennis rackets and balls, a 30% rise in youth soccer games played and a 4% increase in inflatable-product sales. The barbecue industry claimed to benefit by $150 million.
Most Americans are happy to give the economy a little boost -- even in Indiana. The whole Hoosier state recently declared its intention to spring forward this year. And then Congress did it again -- it extended the 2007 daylight-saving period to eight months, presumably to save another 100,000 theoretical barrels of oil a day.
This has become a cynical substitute for sensible energy policy. Even if we all eat breakfast in the dark in March and November, we won't save much oil because less than 5% of domestic electricity is generated by oil. We will consume more gasoline. When Americans go to the ballpark or the mall, we hop in our cars.
If you play with the clock on short winter days, nobody wins. Even in New York and other cities in the eastern halves of time zones, the sun will set by 5:45 in November 2007. For the new recruits in South Bend and Terre Haute, and millions of daylight savers in the western reaches of their time zones, the sun won't rise until 8:30 a.m. Come on, Congress! That's just bad sportsmanship!
Mr. Downing is the author of "Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time" (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005).
