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Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time
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Product details
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press (February 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1560257962
ASIN: B000TFWHG6
Product Dimensions:
8.2 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.6 out of 5 stars
16 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#703,435 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Disclosure: The author and I were colleagues back in the 1980’s. David told a good story then, and I expected him to tell a good story here. I was not disappointed.You can read the other reviews posted here for highlights. The reading is easy and the tone light, with many fascinating vignettes scattered throughout. Quite a few times I looked up from my reading and said to my wife, “Listen to this one.†But it’s more than just stories; the stories take you through the development of first the idea and then the realities of Daylight Saving Time in such a way that you feel you really understand its evolution. I highly recommend the book for leisure reading.
I learned so much from this book. In a random internet sort of way, I learned that despite always getting the blame, farmers actually hated DST. It was set up for leisure and maybe the leisure class. Ben Franklin started us down this road because he was not in fact an early riser. The very contentious very fractured and very circuitous path to the world especially America adopting DST was almost riveting. Along the way WWI, WWII, the oil crisis, and more big world events play their roles. Really a fascinating book whether it has ever dawned on you to wonder about time on a clock v time of the sun you will after reading this
I grew up hearing as an explanation for Daylight Saving Time that it was "good for the farmers." It turns out that this is a widespread misconception, and it also turns out not to be true: farmers have in fact historically opposed the adoption or expansion of DST because of the inconveniences it imposes on them. Another childhood illusion put to bed, if decades late.Since 1986 the U.S. has observed DST from the first Sunday of April to the last Sunday of October. Beginning in 2007, DST is to be expanded by three weeks (in accordance with the Energy Policy Act of 2005). It will now begin on the second Sunday of March and extend until the first Sunday of November. Given this change I figured it was high time for me to find out what Daylight Saving Time is all about.I review below David Prerau's Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time. It's the first of two DST-related books that have been weighing down my TBR shelves. Both books were published in 2005--the idea of exploring DST apparently being very much in the air in the first years of the new millennium.---Benjamin Franklin proposed in 1784, when he was serving as the American minister to France, that Parisians conserve energy--in the form of candle wax and tallow--by changing their habits, rising with the sun rather than sleeping in with their shutters closed against the daylight. The idea never caught on, and it is at any rate impractical as it would depend on the alteration of individual habits on a large scale for it to have any chance of working for a community. Over a hundred years later, in 1905, a certain William Willett devised an alternative plan for increasing the number of usable daylight hours during England's summer months. His plan, what we now call Daylight Saving Time, called for setting the nation's clocks forward in the spring (he initially imagined the time being changed in 20-minute increments on each of four successive Sundays) and back in the fall, thus not relying on people to alter their sleep patterns on an individual basis. His idea didn't catch on either, at least not immediately. In his book Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time author David Prerau, who has coauthored government reports on the effects of DST, traces the complex history of DST from Willett's tireless campaigning on behalf of its adoption to the modern era. Prerau also provides a chapter on the two artificial adjustments to natural sun time that men adopted prior to the introduction of DST. (Mean solar time was adopted starting in the late 18th century. It differs from apparent solar time in that the length of a day is a constant throughout the year rather than depending on the amount of daylight in any given day, which varies throughout the year. The second artificial adjustment was standard time, adopted in the late 19th century, which is when a single mean time is recognized over a large area.)The history of DST has been, as Prerau's subtitle asserts, a highly contentious one, the case for and against its adoption taken up over the years by a variety of special interest groups--the railroads, theater operators, purveyors of sporting goods, golfers and farmers and concerned parents and religious purists. Political cartoonist jumped to portray its inconveniences. Presidents and prime ministers came to recognize its merits as an economizing measure. And scientists and astronomers were divided on the question of implementing it. The editors of the scientific journal Nature, for example, ridiculed DST early on by equating the time change with the artificial elevation of thermometer readings in the winter:"'It would be more reasonable to change the readings of a thermometer at a particular season than to alter the time shown on the clock, which is another scientific instrument.' They wondered if perhaps another bill would be proposed 'to increase the readings of thermometers by ten degrees during the winter months, so that 32∘F shall be 42∘F. One temperature can be called another just as easily as 2 A.M. can be expressed as 3 A.M.; but the change of name in neither case causes a change of condition.'"It's surprising just how many people have had an axe to grind one way or another on the DST issue.The implementation of DST was neither a quick affair nor a straightforward one. Initially adopted in the U.S. during World War I, for example, it was repealed in 1919, retained in pockets of the country between the Wars, adopted again and expanded during Wold War II, and repealed again by Truman after the War. It remained in use by local option in the decades following, and wasn't adopted as national law until 1966. Even now its implementation is not entirely regular, as certain states and territories have opted not to observe DST. In short, the history of Daylight Saving Time is a confusing mess. Transforming the complex story of its adoption in the U.S. and England and elsewhere in the world into a readable narrative is a great accomplishment.Prerau's book is packed with information, some of which certainly surprised me. I'd had no idea, for example, that it was standard as late as the 19th century for communities to determine their time locally, so that the time from town to town would vary by minutes depending on how the communities were situated from one another longitudinally. "As long as travel and communications were relatively slow, it didn't much matter that, for instance, in the United States when it was 12:00 noon in Chicago it was 12:31 in Pittsburgh, 12:24 in Cleveland, 12:17 in Toledo, 12:13 in Cincinnati, 12:09 in Louisville, 12:07 in Indianapolis, 11:50 in St. Louis, 11:48 in Dubuque, 11:39 in St. Paul, and 11:27 in Omaha. The relaxed pace of travel, the lack of instant communications, the inherent inaccuracy of contemporary clocks, and the less frantic pace of life all made minor time variations unimportant."What a strange world our great-grandparents inhabited.Prerau sometimes errs on the side of including too many details in his book, but for the most part the story he tells is fascinating, and the book well written. Seize the Daylight is a nice example of a type of book that I particularly enjoy, one that is as informative as it is interesting to read, one that sheds light on a convention or invention that quietly informs our daily lives but which few of us bother to investigate on our own. Seize the Daylight definitely rewards the reading.Debra Hamel -- author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)
Very informative
Everybody talks about Daylight Savings Time. This book tells an interesting story about it and timekeeping.
This book really opened my eyes to the story of "Daylight Saving Time".It was a fast read and I recommend it to anyone who is involved in DST.:)Highly recommended.
The first thing I learned from Prerau’s excellent little book is that it is not mere pedantry to call it Daylight “Saving†Time instead of Daylight “Savings†Time, as I have my whole life. The idea is that by switching the clocks we are saving daylight that would otherwise be wasted while we sleep. But I suppose the language patterns of “savings bank†and “savings account†are too strong to be resisted.The second thing I learned is that virtually all the arguments advanced even today against DST were already put forward when the idea was first seriously proposed in the early 20th century. I must say that the author is so fair that after reading this book, which is pro DST, I have more respect for the contra arguments. The dairy farmers do have a legitimate beef, if you will pardon the expression.Robert Frost, before he had any success as a poet, tried to make a living as a farmer in New England. By all accounts, he was not very good at it. Late at night, after the rest of the family had gone to bed, he would stay up late, composing poems on the kitchen table, going out to observe the starry sky when he got stuck. As a result, he got up late in the morning. Sometimes he didn’t milk the cows until noon. He’s supposed to have said, “The cows got used to it quicker than the neighbors did.â€And that’s been pretty much my attitude to those who oppose DSL and almost invariably mention “the cows.†It may not accord with ancient tradition, and it may not make sense at all places and all times (countries near the equator have little need for it), but for the most part, it is eminently practical. As Winston Churchill said long ago, DSL is not a change “from natural time to artificial time.†Rather, it substitutes “a convenient standard of artificial time for an inconvenient standard of artificial time.†Few people are inconvenienced by DSL for more than a day, if that.Here in Russia it was President Medvedev who mentioned cows when he arbitrarily reduced the number of time zones (from eleven to nine) and changed the entire country to year-round summer time back in 2011. To critics who say, “If DST is such a good idea, let’s move the time zones one hour forward and then leave them there rather than shift back and forth twice a year,†all I can say is: I’m living in a land that does precisely that, and in these northern latitudes it’s nothing but misery during the winter. In December and January it doesn’t get light until 10 in the morning. I’m not talking about sunrise – it’s often so cloudy here you don’t see the sun for weeks at a time – I’m talking about a whiter shade of pale.But not to worry – we have another president now who’s made it his mission, it sometimes seems, to undo everything his predecessor did – with the exception, so far, of the time change. Rumor has it that after the Winter Olympics are over, the Russian Federation will adjust the clocks once again – to year-round Winter Time! Brilliant. Then it will be the summer months that are unbearable, with light in the sky at 4 a.m.The most uplifting part of Prerau’s book is the detailed discussion of how democratic societies (most of his examples being taken from the US and the UK) have argued, sometimes at agonizing length, about this matter from the very beginning. William Willett, the first champion of DSL, originally suggested having eight changes of the clock per year – four in the spring, four in the fall. It was the process of open public discussion – not the whim of the head of state – that led to the situation of compromise and consensus that now obtains in the US, where for example some western parts of Indiana choose to live in a different time zone than the rest of the Hoosier state and everyone is okay with that.Except maybe for some cows.
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