October 29, 2025 • 26 mins
Set it and forget it! That's what most Americans want to do with their clocks. They want standard time year-round. So, why are we stuck with Daylight Saving Time? And where did it come from in the first place? Some say it was Benjamin Franklin. But if we Scooby-Doo this thing and pull off the mask to see who's really behind this whole clock caper it's ... (gasp) ... CAPITALISM!
Tune in an hour earlier ... or is it later? ... for this episode.
GUEST: Chad Orzel, author of the book, A Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you stay on the daylight saving time that we
use in the summer, then sunrise in a lot of
East Coast cities in December is like nine in the morning, right,
And so you know, children waiting for the bus the
sun isn't up yet, and people hate that even more
than they hate resetting their clocks.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
You've reached American History Hotline. You asked the questions, we
get the answers. Leave a message. Hey, there are American
History Hotliners. Bob Crawford here, thrilled to be joining you
again for another episode of American History Hotline, the show
where you ask the questions. And the best way to
get us a question is to record a video or
(00:46):
a voice memo on your phone and email it to
Americanistory Hotline at gmail dot com. That's American History Hotline
at gmail dot com. Okay, today's question is something that
that's a little divisive. I don't know how divisive it is,
but we're about to find out. Here to help me
answer the question is Chad Orzell. He's author of the
(01:11):
book A Brief History of Timekeeping, The science of marking
time from Stonehenge to atomic clocks. He's also an Associate
professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union
College in Schenectady, New York. Chad, thanks for joining me today.
Thanks for having me on all right, Chad. Our question
(01:34):
comes from Donna in Stockton, California. She wants to know
why the heck do we still have daylight saving time
and why can't we get rid of it?
Speaker 1 (01:47):
So the question of daylight saving time is really it's
a question of priorities, right. There are two things that
daylight saving time accomplishes. One is it ensures that the
son sun rises relatively early in the winter, so it's
not sunrise at nine am, as it would be in
(02:09):
my area if we were on daylight saving year round.
And it also ensures that the sun is up late
in the summer, so you have those nice long summer evenings,
you know, where you can go to a baseball game
and it's light out until, you know, after nine o'clock.
And we like both of those things. We like having
(02:29):
both of those, and we would lose those if we
went we could only keep one of those if we
went to a system where we're either daylight saving year
round or standard time year round. So it's kind of
the best way to balance those two things that we
like having. So take us back before this, right before.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Standardized time and time zones, what did people do?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
So the oldest forms of timekeeping all rely on the
position of the sun in the sky, right you say,
you know, the sun comes up in the eastsh and
it sets in the west ish and moves across the
sky over the course of the day, and you can
keep track of the time by roughly where it is.
If you want to be a little more precise, you can,
you know, put a stick in the ground and some
(03:13):
markings and make yourself a sun dial, and everybody just
sort of associated. You know, noon is when the sun
is at its highest point in the sky. It's due
south if you're in the northern hemisphere, and so you
can identify that point and call that noon. That varies
from place to place as you move around the earth.
(03:34):
So as you move from east to west, the sun
will appear either higher in the sky or lower in
the sky at the same instant, and so the time
of noon is different in different locations. Now that doesn't
matter if the fastest transportation you have is, you know,
(03:55):
getting a guy on a horse or a ship, sailing
on the ocean, and because you're never going to move
far enough for it to make a significant difference. But
once you start to get things like trains and then
you know, fast boats and airplanes, then it starts to
matter a lot.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
And is that when it came into standardization, like at
the advent of the of the railroad.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
It's the advent of the railroads. And also the telegraph
is a really big thing because that lets you send
messages instantaneously over enormous distances, and you know, suddenly you
can be in New York City and you know, sending
a telegram to somebody in San Francisco and getting a
response back in minutes or hours rather than you know,
(04:41):
taking three months to get there and back. So then
it really starts to matter that, you know, the sun
is much lower in the sky in San Francisco than
it is in New York. So I'm thinking the eighteen
thirties a little later than that eighteen fifties is when
it starts to really become an issue. By the mid
(05:02):
eighteen hundreds, the railroads are kind of standardizing things on
their own right. Any individual railroad company owns many miles
of track. They string telegraph cables along those tracks, and
they use them to sync up all of their own clocks,
so they're pretty well pretty well locked in the you know,
(05:25):
it's around in the eighteen fifties the rail companies sort
of start to agree to synchronize their schedules with each other,
so they're taking a smallish number of local times, but
most municipalities still sort of kept track of their own.
You know, noon is when the sun is highest in
the sky, and then there's railroad time, which is what
(05:48):
you need to know if you're going to get on
a train here.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
So it really didn't matter at that point if it's
twelve fifteen in Charlotte, North Carolina and twelve forty seven
in Philadelphia.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Right, it didn't make that much difference. You know, it's
a handful of minutes most places that you would travel
over the course of a day, or you know, it's
maybe like half an hour if you take a really
long ride and arrive in a distant location. So you know,
it's not that big a deal for most people, and
(06:18):
people just kind of rolled with it.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
So what about time zones? When did they come into standardization?
Speaker 1 (06:26):
So this all happens in the eighteen seventies into early
eighteen eighties, and it starts with a guy named Cleveland Abbey,
who was one of the first weather forecasters. He's at
the forerunner of the National Weather Service, and he was
trying to coordinate weather observations across a huge area of
(06:47):
the country and also the most dramatic event was an
Aurora borealis that happened in eighteen seventy four, and he
was trying to link up measurements of many observers in
many different locations were recording their observations. He was trying
to piece it all together, and he found it was
it was a miserable mess because people had, you know,
(07:10):
written down the time according to their local clock, and
other people were on railroad time, and people were you know,
scattered all over and putting it all together was a
real mess. So he started to lobby for establishing some
sort of standardization of time, and you know, pitched the
idea of we should just divide the country up into
(07:31):
chunks and have them all agree to be the same time.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Pitched it to.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
He started with a group called the American Metrological Society
that didn't actually do very much. They were at Columbia
and so their response was the classic academic response of
just creating a committee and making him the chair of it.
But he was a civil servant, so he knew how
to deal with that, and he responded by reaching out
(07:59):
to people had actual power, which included both the government
and the railroads. So there's a trade organization that was
the General Time Convention of Railroad Officials, which coordinated schedules
of rail lines all across the country. And he got
in touch with the guy who ran that and brought
(08:20):
the idea to him, fellow named William Allen, And he
had a counterpart in Canada named Sanford Fleming who was
thinking along similar lines. And the two of them, you know,
got with the railroads and said, Alan very explicitly pitched
it to the railroads as look, if we don't do something,
(08:41):
Congress is going to get involved, and we're not going
to like whatever Congress comes up with, so we should
just impose our own system of time zones and then
everybody else will go along. And that's in fact what happened.
They drew up a set of time zones based on
where there were boundaries between collections of railroad companies. It
(09:03):
turns out to be pretty close to the Eastern, Central,
Mountain Western zones that we have now, and they just said,
you know, all of the railroad companies agreed to adopt
this system, and then they lobbied local municipalities to sign
on to their time scheme, and that ended up becoming
the backbone of standardized time zones in the US.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
And so the idea that the Easter time zone is
an hour different from Central, and Mountain is two hour
different from East, and Pacific is three hour different from East.
That was just kind of a you know, it's not
to the minute, but it was an estimation.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Right, and what works out nicely, you know there the
width of those zones is approximately one hour in difference
in the position of the sun and the sky, so
that works out pretty pretty nicely. And you know, everybody
in the zone had to change their clocks a little bit,
so they they he was really savvy with this this plan.
(10:07):
So he fixed the time based on the observatory in Greenwich,
England right meantime, yeah, and which hadn't yet been fully established,
but he tied it to that because that meant that
that literally every city, every major city, had to change
their clocks by a few minutes, so nobody. It wasn't
(10:29):
like Washington, d c. Was being forced to adopt New
York City time, or you know, Atlanta was being forced
to adopt Boston time. Everybody had to change the clocks
by a little bit, and so it was easier to
put over on the on the big cities.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Chad, do you ever think to yourself that there's no
way that we could come up with this again these days?
Speaker 1 (10:49):
It would be hard to get everybody to sign on
to these these days, particularly since you've got you know,
if you look at sort of eastern Maine to western Indiana,
that's like it's like an hour and ten minutes actual
difference if you were going by the position of the sun,
and so it's you know, for those people at those
(11:11):
edges of those boundaries, it's not a small difference in
the length of your day.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
So daylight saving time when does that enter the chat?
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Daylight saving time comes about starts in Europe around World
War One, and it's basically, as the name suggests, it's
a way to avoid having to burn energy to generate light, right,
So they don't want to have to burn coal to
generate electricity to power lights, so they just make they
(11:46):
shift the clocks so it's daylight longer, and then people
don't need to turn the lights on, and then they
can save coal for the war effort. That starts during
World War One gets pretty universally adopted by the combatants,
including the US when we get into it, and then
after the war kind of gets a little loose for
(12:06):
a while, and then in World War Two, everybody again
does this shift of clocks in the summertime to make
it light longer so that you're not using coal and
oil that could go to the war effort. And then
after World War Two it sticks around much more, you know,
observed a little intermittently, but you know, by the nineteen
(12:29):
sixties they decide to, you know, we really need to
formalize this. In the mid sixties they pass a uniform
Time Act that defines, okay, we're going to have these
time zones. These are the approximate boundaries and sets up
some rules for those states on the edges as to,
you know, what can you do in terms of coming
(12:50):
in coming out of time zones and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
We're about to take a quick break, but before I do,
I want to let you know all about my new
book that's coming out soon. It's called America's Founding Son,
John Quincy Adams, from President to political maverick. Pre order
your book today. It's available wherever you buy your books.
(13:19):
This is American History Hotline. I'm your host Bob Crawford. Today.
My guest is Chad Orzelle, author of the book A
Brief History of Time Keeping the science of marking time
from Stonehenge to atomic clocks. We're talking about springing forward
and falling back, Why do we do it? And should
(13:39):
we keep doing it? Remember? Send us your questions about
American history. Record them yourself using your voice memo app
on your phone and email them to Americanhistory Hotline at
gmail dot com. That's American History Hotline at gmail dot com.
Now back to the show. Chad, let's talk about Arizona. Okay,
(14:03):
anytime I travel there and it's daylight saving time, I
get messed up. What's up with Arizona?
Speaker 1 (14:10):
So, Arizona is one of the last holdouts in not
participating in the time switch, and their argument is actually
energy based as well. The origin of daylight savings is
trying not to spend fuel that could go to other
purposes on generating artificial light. Arizona's argument these days is, look,
(14:34):
it's really hot here, and so if people are awake,
you know, longer during daylight hours, that's more time that
it's really hot. And you know, we have to do
air conditioning and things like that. Our people are just miserable.
So you know, it doesn't save us any energy to
(14:55):
move the clocks later in the summer. We actually want
it to get dark earlier in Arizona so that the
temperature goes down and things are more pleasant. Uh. The
other big one that that doesn't participate is Hawaii, which, uh,
you know doesn't directly border anything else. And also they're
far enough in the tropics that the change in the
(15:16):
length of the day isn't that great to begin with,
so it doesn't make as much of a difference if
they push daylight back and forth. So Hawaii for a
long time, doesn't.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
It is Hawaiian Pacific time zone, or that they have
a whole they're their own time zone. They have their
own time zone.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Yeah, I think they're they're five hours off East coast time.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
So and and just to make this a note, of
the Navajo Nation within Arizona does not observe daylight saving time.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Right, And there's there's been, you know, for a long time,
some counties in Indiana that that stay with the that
go with the central zone because even though the boundary
is supposed to be the state boundary, most of the
people there work in Chicago or in in Springfield, and
so that they, you know, they go with the Illinois
(16:07):
time because that's where most of the people are are working.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
I got to say, I travel a lot, and I
travel west a lot, and every time we hit Central Tennessee,
not oak Ridge, Tennessee, near there, and you get that
extra hour, you really feel like you're you're beating time,
you know, like you're really getting something in your pocket.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
I got. I got myself in trouble one time because
I was going from Georgia to Alabama to give a
talk and you know, spending a leisurely morning, and then
I realized very belatedly that there was a time change involved.
I guess it was the other way. I was started
in Alabama and I was going to Georgia, and then
(16:48):
I was like, oh crap, it's like a different time zone.
Like I have an hour less to get there than
I think I do.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
So so we got Hawaii, we've got hour Zone, we've
got parts of Indiana, any other states not observed.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
It changes fairly frequently. I don't know what the current
status is. I think that's it at the moment.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Well, if you ask any politician and they have nothing
else to talk about, they're going to tell you they
want to get rid of it.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Sometimes if they have other things that they could be
talking about and they want to not be talking about them.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
I think I think you're actually more accurate on that.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Yeah, the issue there is, you know, everybody says they
hate it because it's inconvenient, like twice a year, right,
so you know there's those two days where you have
to reset all the clocks in your house, and you
know that's that's awkward. But as I said at the beginning,
it gets us two things that we like. We tried
(17:49):
in the early nineteen seventies during the oil crunch, there
was a law passed to actually go to year round
daylight saving time, and it took effect in January and
by October when the time to roll the clocks back
came around, by then they had within ten months they
(18:10):
had repealed the law. And we've moved the clocks back again.
And the reason is without if you stay on the
daylight saving time that we use in the summer, then
sunrise in a lot of East Coast cities in December
is like nine in the morning, right, and so you know,
children waiting for the bus, the sun isn't up yet.
(18:32):
And people hate that even more than they hate resetting
their clocks. And so we went back to the system
of springing forward and falling back. You know, the real
disruptive one is the spring where you have to move
the clocks forward, because everybody loses an hour of sleep there,
(18:53):
and that's kind of nobody likes that. The fall one
people don't mind so much because you know, there's one
week end a year when you get an extra hour
of sleep, and that's kind of nice.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
It messes the kids up, though, the kids and dogs.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
The dog is outraged every November. We know, why is
my breakfast an hour late?
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Right? And our kids it just seems to be And
you talk to the teachers at school, and it is
it's school. It really ex younger children.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah, my joke solution to this problem is that we
should we should keep the fall back one. We should
keep that one weekend a year where everybody gets an
extra hour sleep, But we should get rid of the
spring forward and instead, starting at the winter solstice December
(19:45):
twenty first, give or take every weekend, move forward five
minutes for twelve weeks, and that gets you back to
an hour forward in the middle of March, right, and that,
you know, five minutes a weekend. Nobody would notice that,
and you know your the clock in my car is
off by five minutes already, so it'd be fine, It
(20:07):
wouldn't wouldn't disrupt anything, and then you would you would
smooth out that that spring forward bit and still have
the nice you know, oh I get some extra sleep tonight.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Well, Chad, most clocks these days do it themselves.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Right, you're taking your time off. You know, if I
really care what time it is, I look at my smartphone,
which has the time automatically updated from from the internet. Now,
every time I pitched that idea, everybody who works with
computers who hears it just throws things at me. Yes,
they don't want to they know what would be involved
in dealing with that.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
But well, so, Chad. There is this perception that because
I remember before the last, the most recent election, it
was Senator Marco Rubio, who who was really on on
the charge along. It was a bipartisan effort, but to
to get rid of daylight save time because they people
(21:02):
believe it's an outdated concept. But from what you're telling me,
it's not an outdated concept. We still it's still applicable
to our lives, even in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yeah, it's you know, as I said, it's a question
of priorities and what are you what are you looking for?
And I think the important thing to keep in mind is,
you know, the whole system is pretty arbitrary, right. Our
system of time zones relies on us pretending that it
is the precise same time of day in eastern Maine
(21:35):
and western Indiana, and that's you know, that makes no
actual geographical or astronomical sense, but we do it because
it's convenient. It means that, you know, except for a
handful of border regions, right, you're not going to drive
anywhere and have the time of day change in a
(21:55):
way that's going to be irritating. It's really easy to
coordinate activity over you know, the kind of span that
you can can drive in a car in a day,
and that works out pretty nicely and makes everybody's lives
a lot easier if we're already disrupting, you know, the
natural order of people in eastern Maine and western Indiana
(22:17):
enough to to you know, arbitrarily assign them. The same time,
it's not that much more of a disruption to have
to change the clocks every now and then, and then
you get those nice, long summer evenings, and then it's
not pitch dark when you arrive at work in December mornings,
and everybody's probably happier for it.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
Looking at this from a historical perspective, daylight saving time
time zones, they are part of the rise of capitalism,
right they were? You know it was business who created these, right,
American businesses. American industry created this.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Yeah, I said, it's the quintess It's adopted through the
quintessential American process of having large corporations lobby for it
and get the system adopted that way.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Was there anything at the stint around the same time
happening in Europe? Were they asking for this? You know?
Because it is this an American innovation that spread worldwide.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Now the Europeans were thinking along similar lines, and there's
actually a major conference in the mid eighteen eighties. That's
that's held in Washington, d C. Where they bring together
representatives of all the major world powers and talk about
we should standardize times sort of globally. Most European countries
(23:49):
had already within their own borders set up standard time.
They just made a time zone that is their own country,
and then you know, there was some coordination among nations
that shared borders and so on. So there was this
move to standardize everything in the eighteen eighties. The big
(24:10):
sticking point ended up being where do you put the zero?
Where do you call what do you call zero? Longitude?
Where you know? And then everybody references their clocks to that,
and the two big contenders were Greenwich, England and Paris, France.
And Paris had sort of the claim of having an older,
more prestigious observatory that had been in the business longer.
(24:33):
The British counter argument was that like seventy five percent
of world shipping used maps that were made in the UK,
and that ended up carrying the day. The US had,
because of William Allen, already sinked their clocks to something
that was based on the time in Greenwich, and so
(24:54):
we were we were fine with it, and so it
went along, and so the French got out voted because
most people were using British nautical maps anyway, and it
was just easier to go with that and use the
time based on Greenwich.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Well, Chad, where can people find your work?
Speaker 1 (25:14):
I have a substack, you know, under my own name
on a lot of things. The books are available wherever
books are sold.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
I've been speaking with Chad Orzell. He's author of the
book A Brief History of Timekeeping The Science of Marketing
Time from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks. He's also an associate
professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union
College in Schenectady, New York. Chad, thank you so much.
It's been great.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Thank you. You've been listening to American History Hotline, a
production of iHeart Podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show's
executive producer is James Morse. Our executive producers from iHeart
are Jordan Runtall and Jason English. Original music composed.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
By me Bob Crawford.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Please keep in touch. Our email is Americanhistory Hotline at
gmail dot com. If you like the show, please tell
your friends and leave us a review. In Apple Podcasts.
I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Feel free to hit me
up on social media to ask a history question or
to let me know what you think of the show.
(26:31):
You can find me at Bob Crawford Base. Thanks so
much for listening, See you next week.
If you stay on the daylight saving time that we
use in the summer, then sunrise in a lot of
East Coast cities in December is like nine in the morning, right,
And so you know, children waiting for the bus the
sun isn't up yet, and people hate that even more
than they hate resetting their clocks.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
You've reached American History Hotline. You asked the questions, we
get the answers. Leave a message. Hey, there are American
History Hotliners. Bob Crawford here, thrilled to be joining you
again for another episode of American History Hotline, the show
where you ask the questions. And the best way to
get us a question is to record a video or
(00:46):
a voice memo on your phone and email it to
Americanistory Hotline at gmail dot com. That's American History Hotline
at gmail dot com. Okay, today's question is something that
that's a little divisive. I don't know how divisive it is,
but we're about to find out. Here to help me
answer the question is Chad Orzell. He's author of the
(01:11):
book A Brief History of Timekeeping, The science of marking
time from Stonehenge to atomic clocks. He's also an Associate
professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union
College in Schenectady, New York. Chad, thanks for joining me today.
Thanks for having me on all right, Chad. Our question
(01:34):
comes from Donna in Stockton, California. She wants to know
why the heck do we still have daylight saving time
and why can't we get rid of it?
Speaker 1 (01:47):
So the question of daylight saving time is really it's
a question of priorities, right. There are two things that
daylight saving time accomplishes. One is it ensures that the
son sun rises relatively early in the winter, so it's
not sunrise at nine am, as it would be in
(02:09):
my area if we were on daylight saving year round.
And it also ensures that the sun is up late
in the summer, so you have those nice long summer evenings,
you know, where you can go to a baseball game
and it's light out until, you know, after nine o'clock.
And we like both of those things. We like having
(02:29):
both of those, and we would lose those if we
went we could only keep one of those if we
went to a system where we're either daylight saving year
round or standard time year round. So it's kind of
the best way to balance those two things that we
like having. So take us back before this, right before.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Standardized time and time zones, what did people do?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
So the oldest forms of timekeeping all rely on the
position of the sun in the sky, right you say,
you know, the sun comes up in the eastsh and
it sets in the west ish and moves across the
sky over the course of the day, and you can
keep track of the time by roughly where it is.
If you want to be a little more precise, you can,
you know, put a stick in the ground and some
(03:13):
markings and make yourself a sun dial, and everybody just
sort of associated. You know, noon is when the sun
is at its highest point in the sky. It's due
south if you're in the northern hemisphere, and so you
can identify that point and call that noon. That varies
from place to place as you move around the earth.
(03:34):
So as you move from east to west, the sun
will appear either higher in the sky or lower in
the sky at the same instant, and so the time
of noon is different in different locations. Now that doesn't
matter if the fastest transportation you have is, you know,
(03:55):
getting a guy on a horse or a ship, sailing
on the ocean, and because you're never going to move
far enough for it to make a significant difference. But
once you start to get things like trains and then
you know, fast boats and airplanes, then it starts to
matter a lot.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
And is that when it came into standardization, like at
the advent of the of the railroad.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
It's the advent of the railroads. And also the telegraph
is a really big thing because that lets you send
messages instantaneously over enormous distances, and you know, suddenly you
can be in New York City and you know, sending
a telegram to somebody in San Francisco and getting a
response back in minutes or hours rather than you know,
(04:41):
taking three months to get there and back. So then
it really starts to matter that, you know, the sun
is much lower in the sky in San Francisco than
it is in New York. So I'm thinking the eighteen
thirties a little later than that eighteen fifties is when
it starts to really become an issue. By the mid
(05:02):
eighteen hundreds, the railroads are kind of standardizing things on
their own right. Any individual railroad company owns many miles
of track. They string telegraph cables along those tracks, and
they use them to sync up all of their own clocks,
so they're pretty well pretty well locked in the you know,
(05:25):
it's around in the eighteen fifties the rail companies sort
of start to agree to synchronize their schedules with each other,
so they're taking a smallish number of local times, but
most municipalities still sort of kept track of their own.
You know, noon is when the sun is highest in
the sky, and then there's railroad time, which is what
(05:48):
you need to know if you're going to get on
a train here.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
So it really didn't matter at that point if it's
twelve fifteen in Charlotte, North Carolina and twelve forty seven
in Philadelphia.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Right, it didn't make that much difference. You know, it's
a handful of minutes most places that you would travel
over the course of a day, or you know, it's
maybe like half an hour if you take a really
long ride and arrive in a distant location. So you know,
it's not that big a deal for most people, and
(06:18):
people just kind of rolled with it.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
So what about time zones? When did they come into standardization?
Speaker 1 (06:26):
So this all happens in the eighteen seventies into early
eighteen eighties, and it starts with a guy named Cleveland Abbey,
who was one of the first weather forecasters. He's at
the forerunner of the National Weather Service, and he was
trying to coordinate weather observations across a huge area of
(06:47):
the country and also the most dramatic event was an
Aurora borealis that happened in eighteen seventy four, and he
was trying to link up measurements of many observers in
many different locations were recording their observations. He was trying
to piece it all together, and he found it was
it was a miserable mess because people had, you know,
(07:10):
written down the time according to their local clock, and
other people were on railroad time, and people were you know,
scattered all over and putting it all together was a
real mess. So he started to lobby for establishing some
sort of standardization of time, and you know, pitched the
idea of we should just divide the country up into
(07:31):
chunks and have them all agree to be the same time.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Pitched it to.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
He started with a group called the American Metrological Society
that didn't actually do very much. They were at Columbia
and so their response was the classic academic response of
just creating a committee and making him the chair of it.
But he was a civil servant, so he knew how
to deal with that, and he responded by reaching out
(07:59):
to people had actual power, which included both the government
and the railroads. So there's a trade organization that was
the General Time Convention of Railroad Officials, which coordinated schedules
of rail lines all across the country. And he got
in touch with the guy who ran that and brought
(08:20):
the idea to him, fellow named William Allen, And he
had a counterpart in Canada named Sanford Fleming who was
thinking along similar lines. And the two of them, you know,
got with the railroads and said, Alan very explicitly pitched
it to the railroads as look, if we don't do something,
(08:41):
Congress is going to get involved, and we're not going
to like whatever Congress comes up with, so we should
just impose our own system of time zones and then
everybody else will go along. And that's in fact what happened.
They drew up a set of time zones based on
where there were boundaries between collections of railroad companies. It
(09:03):
turns out to be pretty close to the Eastern, Central,
Mountain Western zones that we have now, and they just said,
you know, all of the railroad companies agreed to adopt
this system, and then they lobbied local municipalities to sign
on to their time scheme, and that ended up becoming
the backbone of standardized time zones in the US.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
And so the idea that the Easter time zone is
an hour different from Central, and Mountain is two hour
different from East, and Pacific is three hour different from East.
That was just kind of a you know, it's not
to the minute, but it was an estimation.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Right, and what works out nicely, you know there the
width of those zones is approximately one hour in difference
in the position of the sun and the sky, so
that works out pretty pretty nicely. And you know, everybody
in the zone had to change their clocks a little bit,
so they they he was really savvy with this this plan.
(10:07):
So he fixed the time based on the observatory in Greenwich,
England right meantime, yeah, and which hadn't yet been fully established,
but he tied it to that because that meant that
that literally every city, every major city, had to change
their clocks by a few minutes, so nobody. It wasn't
(10:29):
like Washington, d c. Was being forced to adopt New
York City time, or you know, Atlanta was being forced
to adopt Boston time. Everybody had to change the clocks
by a little bit, and so it was easier to
put over on the on the big cities.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Chad, do you ever think to yourself that there's no
way that we could come up with this again these days?
Speaker 1 (10:49):
It would be hard to get everybody to sign on
to these these days, particularly since you've got you know,
if you look at sort of eastern Maine to western Indiana,
that's like it's like an hour and ten minutes actual
difference if you were going by the position of the sun,
and so it's you know, for those people at those
(11:11):
edges of those boundaries, it's not a small difference in
the length of your day.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
So daylight saving time when does that enter the chat?
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Daylight saving time comes about starts in Europe around World
War One, and it's basically, as the name suggests, it's
a way to avoid having to burn energy to generate light, right,
So they don't want to have to burn coal to
generate electricity to power lights, so they just make they
(11:46):
shift the clocks so it's daylight longer, and then people
don't need to turn the lights on, and then they
can save coal for the war effort. That starts during
World War One gets pretty universally adopted by the combatants,
including the US when we get into it, and then
after the war kind of gets a little loose for
(12:06):
a while, and then in World War Two, everybody again
does this shift of clocks in the summertime to make
it light longer so that you're not using coal and
oil that could go to the war effort. And then
after World War Two it sticks around much more, you know,
observed a little intermittently, but you know, by the nineteen
(12:29):
sixties they decide to, you know, we really need to
formalize this. In the mid sixties they pass a uniform
Time Act that defines, okay, we're going to have these
time zones. These are the approximate boundaries and sets up
some rules for those states on the edges as to,
you know, what can you do in terms of coming
(12:50):
in coming out of time zones and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
We're about to take a quick break, but before I do,
I want to let you know all about my new
book that's coming out soon. It's called America's Founding Son,
John Quincy Adams, from President to political maverick. Pre order
your book today. It's available wherever you buy your books.
(13:19):
This is American History Hotline. I'm your host Bob Crawford. Today.
My guest is Chad Orzelle, author of the book A
Brief History of Time Keeping the science of marking time
from Stonehenge to atomic clocks. We're talking about springing forward
and falling back, Why do we do it? And should
(13:39):
we keep doing it? Remember? Send us your questions about
American history. Record them yourself using your voice memo app
on your phone and email them to Americanhistory Hotline at
gmail dot com. That's American History Hotline at gmail dot com.
Now back to the show. Chad, let's talk about Arizona. Okay,
(14:03):
anytime I travel there and it's daylight saving time, I
get messed up. What's up with Arizona?
Speaker 1 (14:10):
So, Arizona is one of the last holdouts in not
participating in the time switch, and their argument is actually
energy based as well. The origin of daylight savings is
trying not to spend fuel that could go to other
purposes on generating artificial light. Arizona's argument these days is, look,
(14:34):
it's really hot here, and so if people are awake,
you know, longer during daylight hours, that's more time that
it's really hot. And you know, we have to do
air conditioning and things like that. Our people are just miserable.
So you know, it doesn't save us any energy to
(14:55):
move the clocks later in the summer. We actually want
it to get dark earlier in Arizona so that the
temperature goes down and things are more pleasant. Uh. The
other big one that that doesn't participate is Hawaii, which, uh,
you know doesn't directly border anything else. And also they're
far enough in the tropics that the change in the
(15:16):
length of the day isn't that great to begin with,
so it doesn't make as much of a difference if
they push daylight back and forth. So Hawaii for a
long time, doesn't.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
It is Hawaiian Pacific time zone, or that they have
a whole they're their own time zone. They have their
own time zone.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Yeah, I think they're they're five hours off East coast time.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
So and and just to make this a note, of
the Navajo Nation within Arizona does not observe daylight saving time.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Right, And there's there's been, you know, for a long time,
some counties in Indiana that that stay with the that
go with the central zone because even though the boundary
is supposed to be the state boundary, most of the
people there work in Chicago or in in Springfield, and
so that they, you know, they go with the Illinois
(16:07):
time because that's where most of the people are are working.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
I got to say, I travel a lot, and I
travel west a lot, and every time we hit Central Tennessee,
not oak Ridge, Tennessee, near there, and you get that
extra hour, you really feel like you're you're beating time,
you know, like you're really getting something in your pocket.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
I got. I got myself in trouble one time because
I was going from Georgia to Alabama to give a
talk and you know, spending a leisurely morning, and then
I realized very belatedly that there was a time change involved.
I guess it was the other way. I was started
in Alabama and I was going to Georgia, and then
(16:48):
I was like, oh crap, it's like a different time zone.
Like I have an hour less to get there than
I think I do.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
So so we got Hawaii, we've got hour Zone, we've
got parts of Indiana, any other states not observed.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
It changes fairly frequently. I don't know what the current
status is. I think that's it at the moment.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Well, if you ask any politician and they have nothing
else to talk about, they're going to tell you they
want to get rid of it.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Sometimes if they have other things that they could be
talking about and they want to not be talking about them.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
I think I think you're actually more accurate on that.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Yeah, the issue there is, you know, everybody says they
hate it because it's inconvenient, like twice a year, right,
so you know there's those two days where you have
to reset all the clocks in your house, and you
know that's that's awkward. But as I said at the beginning,
it gets us two things that we like. We tried
(17:49):
in the early nineteen seventies during the oil crunch, there
was a law passed to actually go to year round
daylight saving time, and it took effect in January and
by October when the time to roll the clocks back
came around, by then they had within ten months they
(18:10):
had repealed the law. And we've moved the clocks back again.
And the reason is without if you stay on the
daylight saving time that we use in the summer, then
sunrise in a lot of East Coast cities in December
is like nine in the morning, right, and so you know,
children waiting for the bus, the sun isn't up yet.
(18:32):
And people hate that even more than they hate resetting
their clocks. And so we went back to the system
of springing forward and falling back. You know, the real
disruptive one is the spring where you have to move
the clocks forward, because everybody loses an hour of sleep there,
(18:53):
and that's kind of nobody likes that. The fall one
people don't mind so much because you know, there's one
week end a year when you get an extra hour
of sleep, and that's kind of nice.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
It messes the kids up, though, the kids and dogs.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
The dog is outraged every November. We know, why is
my breakfast an hour late?
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Right? And our kids it just seems to be And
you talk to the teachers at school, and it is
it's school. It really ex younger children.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah, my joke solution to this problem is that we
should we should keep the fall back one. We should
keep that one weekend a year where everybody gets an
extra hour sleep, But we should get rid of the
spring forward and instead, starting at the winter solstice December
(19:45):
twenty first, give or take every weekend, move forward five
minutes for twelve weeks, and that gets you back to
an hour forward in the middle of March, right, and that,
you know, five minutes a weekend. Nobody would notice that,
and you know your the clock in my car is
off by five minutes already, so it'd be fine, It
(20:07):
wouldn't wouldn't disrupt anything, and then you would you would
smooth out that that spring forward bit and still have
the nice you know, oh I get some extra sleep tonight.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Well, Chad, most clocks these days do it themselves.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Right, you're taking your time off. You know, if I
really care what time it is, I look at my smartphone,
which has the time automatically updated from from the internet. Now,
every time I pitched that idea, everybody who works with
computers who hears it just throws things at me. Yes,
they don't want to they know what would be involved
in dealing with that.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
But well, so, Chad. There is this perception that because
I remember before the last, the most recent election, it
was Senator Marco Rubio, who who was really on on
the charge along. It was a bipartisan effort, but to
to get rid of daylight save time because they people
(21:02):
believe it's an outdated concept. But from what you're telling me,
it's not an outdated concept. We still it's still applicable
to our lives, even in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yeah, it's you know, as I said, it's a question
of priorities and what are you what are you looking for?
And I think the important thing to keep in mind is,
you know, the whole system is pretty arbitrary, right. Our
system of time zones relies on us pretending that it
is the precise same time of day in eastern Maine
(21:35):
and western Indiana, and that's you know, that makes no
actual geographical or astronomical sense, but we do it because
it's convenient. It means that, you know, except for a
handful of border regions, right, you're not going to drive
anywhere and have the time of day change in a
(21:55):
way that's going to be irritating. It's really easy to
coordinate activity over you know, the kind of span that
you can can drive in a car in a day,
and that works out pretty nicely and makes everybody's lives
a lot easier if we're already disrupting, you know, the
natural order of people in eastern Maine and western Indiana
(22:17):
enough to to you know, arbitrarily assign them. The same time,
it's not that much more of a disruption to have
to change the clocks every now and then, and then
you get those nice, long summer evenings, and then it's
not pitch dark when you arrive at work in December mornings,
and everybody's probably happier for it.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
Looking at this from a historical perspective, daylight saving time
time zones, they are part of the rise of capitalism,
right they were? You know it was business who created these, right,
American businesses. American industry created this.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Yeah, I said, it's the quintess It's adopted through the
quintessential American process of having large corporations lobby for it
and get the system adopted that way.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Was there anything at the stint around the same time
happening in Europe? Were they asking for this? You know?
Because it is this an American innovation that spread worldwide.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Now the Europeans were thinking along similar lines, and there's
actually a major conference in the mid eighteen eighties. That's
that's held in Washington, d C. Where they bring together
representatives of all the major world powers and talk about
we should standardize times sort of globally. Most European countries
(23:49):
had already within their own borders set up standard time.
They just made a time zone that is their own country,
and then you know, there was some coordination among nations
that shared borders and so on. So there was this
move to standardize everything in the eighteen eighties. The big
(24:10):
sticking point ended up being where do you put the zero?
Where do you call what do you call zero? Longitude?
Where you know? And then everybody references their clocks to that,
and the two big contenders were Greenwich, England and Paris, France.
And Paris had sort of the claim of having an older,
more prestigious observatory that had been in the business longer.
(24:33):
The British counter argument was that like seventy five percent
of world shipping used maps that were made in the UK,
and that ended up carrying the day. The US had,
because of William Allen, already sinked their clocks to something
that was based on the time in Greenwich, and so
(24:54):
we were we were fine with it, and so it
went along, and so the French got out voted because
most people were using British nautical maps anyway, and it
was just easier to go with that and use the
time based on Greenwich.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Well, Chad, where can people find your work?
Speaker 1 (25:14):
I have a substack, you know, under my own name
on a lot of things. The books are available wherever
books are sold.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
I've been speaking with Chad Orzell. He's author of the
book A Brief History of Timekeeping The Science of Marketing
Time from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks. He's also an associate
professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union
College in Schenectady, New York. Chad, thank you so much.
It's been great.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Thank you. You've been listening to American History Hotline, a
production of iHeart Podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show's
executive producer is James Morse. Our executive producers from iHeart
are Jordan Runtall and Jason English. Original music composed.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
By me Bob Crawford.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Please keep in touch. Our email is Americanhistory Hotline at
gmail dot com. If you like the show, please tell
your friends and leave us a review. In Apple Podcasts.
I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Feel free to hit me
up on social media to ask a history question or
to let me know what you think of the show.
(26:31):
You can find me at Bob Crawford Base. Thanks so
much for listening, See you next week.
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