Spring Forward, Fall Back

C.A. Asbrey

March is the month when those participating in Daylight Saving Time change their clocks, and do so to the old maxim, spring forward, fall back. Many countries simply don’t bother as there’s no benefit to those countries closer to the equator, but even in countries where they do change the clocks, some regions rebel and refuse to play. Hawaii and most of Arizona don’t participate and neither do most of the US overseas territories like Guam, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands. In Canada, Saskatchewan and the Yukon refuse to play. In Eupope, only Russia, Iceland, Belarus and Turkey stay on the same time all year round.

A common misconception is that Benjamin Franklin invented the idea, but the piece he wrote about saving times was actually satirical. After being wakened at the ungodly hour of 6 a.m. by the summer sun, he wrote an essay stating that Parisians, simply by waking up at dawn, could save the modern-day equivalent of $200 million through “the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.” By the time he was a 78-year-old American envoy in Paris in 1784, the Founding Father who espoused the virtues of “early to bed and early to rise” absolutely did not practice what he preached. He did not like being wakened by the sun. History notes, Franklin wasn’t even suggesting the idea of Daylight Saving Time. He was doing was making fun of the French, and suggesting they get out of bed earlier.

So whose idea was it? Lots of people think it was the farmers, but they were, and are, dead against the idea. Animals work to a body clock, and cows expected to be milked at roughly the same time every day. It was said by some to conserve energy, but studies have shown that it has minimal, or no, affect. Other studies showed that energy usage increases when the change takes place in the autumn.

George Vernon Hudson, an entomologist, published that he changed his clock in New Zealand in 1895, and that it gave him an extra hour to collect bugs in the summer. He suggested that other do the same, but it was dismissed as too complicated. Englishman William Willett was actually the first proper exponent of the idea, publishing a pamphlet ‘The Waste of Daylight‘ in 1907. He actually proposed advancing eighty minutes in monthly increments of twenty each time, reversing it in the Autumn. He was a wealthy builder and suggested that it made it more productive for those working outside. He lobbied parliament, but didn’t live to see it enacted. It was brought in during WW1 in 1916, first in Germany, then in the UK. The Defence of the Realm Act introduced it as a wartime production-boosting device to save on lighting and increase productivity. Many countries then followed suit.

The idea that it was good for productivity has been thoroughly debunked. In fact, it decreases it, mainly because of the impact on people whose sleep patterns are disturbed. Costs save in lighting in the morning are simply transferred to the evening, and a 2013 study found the lost hour cost the U.S. economy around $434 million. The losses are temporary, but happen every year. There are even studies that show that sentences are harsher for those facing court in the days after the clocks go forward.

That loss of sleep in the spring has real effects on people’s health. It has a similar impact to jet lag, and for many people, it throws out their circadian rhythms. Most people recover within a week, but for some people it can take far longer. The result is a measurable increase in heart attacks, ischemic stroke, 5.7% increase workplace injuries, and traffic accidents as people’s. 68% more work days are lost due to injury around the time of the March clock change. Time changes can impact appetite, hormone levels, mood, and attention span, so it’s not surprising that there’s an increasing move to stop adjusting the clock in many states and countries. On a positive note, crime falls at the change of the clocks in March, and many systems change the time automatically nowadays. Every little helps.

The time changes at 2am to minimize the impact on bars and places of entertainment, and not all countries change on the same dates. Most people are asleep when the time actually switches, but it does mean either shorter or longer shifts for those working overnight. That has implications on how those people are paid, with some places simply ignoring the extra hour as something balanced out in the long term. Others treat it as overtime, or make individual arrangements.

It’s fair to say that changing the clocks isn’t universally popular, but it sparked it once sparked an actual riot. In 1997, students in Athens, Ohio were not pleased at their bar being closed an hour earlier. When I say, ‘not pleased’, I mean over a thousand people had to be dispersed by police in full riot gear using rubber bullets and nightsticks. It made headlines all over the United States, and some protestors were quoted as marking the time change as a factor in triggering the violence.

It did throw up a few interesting legal cases too. One man managed to evade being drafted to Vietnam. He had a relatively low draft number due to his birthdate, and at that point a complex lottery was being used to draw tickets. The unnamed draftee was able to successfully appeal based on the fact that he was born just after midnight. However, his state did not change the clocks, and he was born the previous day in his state, but the next day using Daylight Saving Time, as used where the lottery was drawn. That meant that where he lived, his birthdate should not have been entered in the lottery. He won his case.

Another legal case centred around the execution of Salvatore “Sam” Cardinella. He was sentenced to death for the murder of a saloon keeper, but was suspected to have been involved in 20 murders, 100 armed robberies and 150 other burglaries. He successfully argued that the changing the clocks was costing him an hour of the life he was sentenced to lose, and while that didn’t seem like much to anyone else, it could be an hour in which a reprieve could come through. The case was successful and Cardinella won his extra hour of life. No reprieve came through. The governor did not change his mind. He was hanged sitting in a chair as he was apparently unable to stand.

The debate will rage on between those who like the clocks changing, and those who don’t want it, and those who do. You may be able to tell I’m not a fan. The one take away I can offer you is that Coldplay’s Chris Martin is the great-great-grandson of William Willett, the man who lobbied Winston Churchill to change the clocks. Don’t hold it against him. It’s not his fault.