Why can’t the sun just be the arbiter of time?

Benjamin Franklin once wrote “early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” It’s a statement that, when paired with a satirical letter he penned stating that, should the French take up his advice on waking up earlier, they could save on their usage of candles, often has people citing him as the source of the wonderful practice known as daylight savings time.

It is an erroneous attribution, however, and that great honor should instead be bestowed upon a New Zealander named George Hudson.

Hudson, who worked as an entomologist, felt like he wasted a good number of his work hours inside and wanted more time after his shift to do field work. Over a century after Franklin’s jest in France, Hudson proposed a twohour time shift in a pair of papers in 1895 and 1898. While well received, the shift was not adopted at the time, though the idea would catch on in the next few decades in Europe, the United States, and Canada. Many adopted an hour-long shift over the course of the early 1900s, creating practices that are still followed to this day.

All of this is to say that I lost an hour of my weekend and will be thrown for a loop for a week every year, all because some guy wanted more time to catch insects in his spare time over a hundred years ago. So thanks for that, George.

It’s really not that big of a deal, but I’ve found that my internal clock is quite astute. I very rarely need to set an alarm, as I naturally wake up at the same time every day, and then generally feel the same when going to bed. However, that is all thrown to the wind when suddenly my internal clock is an hour behind the rest of the country. Now, instead of waking up at seven, I’m up at eight. On the opposite end, I was still wide awake past midnight.

Or at least, seemingly it wouldn’t be a big deal if this was just me that was feeling this. A number of studies, however, appear to point at the fact that it very much isn’t just myself feeling the effects of the shift.

Studies in 2017 and 2018 have shown that the shift has an adverse effect on many people’s circadian rhythms (the internal clock I mentioned earlier), not just my own, which in turn has shown to lead to an increase in the risk of heart attacks by 10 percent, can reduce efficiency due to tiredness from disrupted sleep patterns, and results in more traffic accidents as drivers are on average more drowsy while at the wheel. One examination of the effects on daylight savings time in 2000 argued that it resulted in a loss of $31 billion on the United States stock exchange on one day.

On the other hand, another 2017 analysis of over 40 studies showed that there were slight electrical energy savings (0.3 percent) created by the practice and there are a few studies that refute the effects on the human circadian rhythms, finding any change to be non-significant. Other studies have found that, while there is an initial increase in traffic accidents in the immediate weeks that follow the daylight savings time shift, the overall traffic fatalities actually is reduced over the whole summer period.

So, whether or not daylight savings time is a net positive or negative seems to be a bit of a toss up at the moment, though it is of note that more of the recent studies seemed to find negative or no effects while the older studies were largely the ones purporting some sort of positive gain. Many of these studies suggest significant effects, however, and it is still worth investigating more if it continues to be something a large part of the world utilizes.

Something that can’t be denied, however, is the amount of research that has seemingly been put into this, as there have been many hours of manpower and effort put into trying to discover whether or not this is something that is actually worth doing or not.

And there you have it. Way more than you ever wanted to know about daylight savings time. Turns out, most of my preconceptions like it being attributed to Mr. Franklin or that it was put into place because of farmers (which it is not, they’ve actually actively lobbied against it in the past) were just wrong. And while I learned a lot, through my descent down this rabbit hole, there was one thing that stuck out to me more than any of the other facts or stats or analyses.

Just remember, all of this was started because there was a dude in New Zealand who was obsessed with collecting bugs. This world is weird.

A C ertain Point of V iew