Why Spring Ahead?(history of Daylight Savings Time)(Brief Article)

Before visiting slumberland on the evening of March 31, Americans will advance their timepieces by one hour and rewind the familiar ritual of Daylight Savings Time: spring ahead, fall back.

An extra hour of daylight on spring and summer nights: Who other than the odd crank could possibly oppose such beneficial clock-tinkering? One such crank was the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, whose grumpy alter ego Samuel Marchbanks wrote, "I object to being told that I am saving daylight when I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the boney, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves."

Marchbanks was an acute detective. Benjamin Franklin, Mr. Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise himself, proposed a forerunner of Daylight Savings Time in a whimsical 1784 essay.

Through most of American history, men and women lived and loved and died on local time, pegged to the transit of the sun. Towns and cities kept their own time, and if the sun's position meant 12:15 in Rochester was 12:09 in Buffalo, so what?

Ah, but the trains must run on time.... Idiosyncratic local timekeeping was the bane of the rail barons. For them, decentralized chronometry was an evil worse than the Dalton Gang. So on November 18, 1883--"the day of two noons"--railroads and countless municipalities synchronized their collective watches all at once: Standard time was born.

Pockets of fierce resistance to standard time were found in flinty New England and across such states as Ohio, Kentucky, and Michigan. In Keeping Watch: A History of American Time, Michael O'Malley found that the standard-time holdouts were not "silly, backward, and provincial." Rather, what "each found puzzling, saddening, or infuriating was the assumption that time was arbitrary, changeable, susceptible to the whims of the railroads or defined by mere commercial expediency. ...