Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time

#167
Title: Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time
Author: David Prerau
Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press
Year: 2005
270 pages

I enjoyed this natural history of daylight saving time, which was indeed contentious. The basic argument against it seems to have been that God's time is superior to man's time. War and commerce have provided the most compelling arguments for man's time (that is, artificial on a fixed schedule rather than artificial on local schedules). Those of us who remember the U.S. energy crisis of the mid-70's probably also remember the extension of daylight saving time and how unnatural it seemed. I myself wrote a letter to President Carter about being a child standing in the dark waiting for my school bus. For some people living at the advent of daylight saving efforts, the experience seemed even more unnatural. However, we would find their notion of naturalness fairly bizarre, as illustrated by this excerpt:

When the railroads in a country established a single time standard, several othger institutions quickly adopted railroad time for their own purposes. Even so, local time continued in extensive use as well. Railroad passengers still had to account for local time as well as railroad time as they moved between trains and towns. Some watchmakers began making watches with two dials, one for local time and one for railroad time, and the great Tom Tower Clock, in Oxford, England, was fitted with two minute hands. In an effort to be comprehensive, one British railroad timetable in 1840 informed passengers, "London time is kept at all stations on the railroad, which is 4 minutes earlier than Reading time, 5 1/2 minutes before Steventon time, 7 1/2 minutes before Cirencester time, 8 minutes before Chippenham time, and 14 minutes before Bridgewater time. (p. 36)
Now you know why so many early British detective novels hinged on train schedules.

Though the ostensive topic may seem arcane, the abstract topics are not: Artificial versus Divine, universal versus national, and the power of war and business to force changes in the infrastructure to serve their purposes.