Let’s celebrate the ritual of ‘springing forward’

March 12 is a holiday of sorts. That’s the date when we all joyfully “spring forward” and return to Daylight Saving Time (DST). 

“Makes me holler all day,” joked a Morehead City, N.C., barber who enjoyed having more daylight after he closed up shop, so he could get in a round of golf before dusk.

 

We’ll have 238 days of DST this year. It computes to about 65% of the entire year. We won’t “fall back” again to Eastern Standard Time until Nov. 5. So, make the most of it…get outdoors and soak up some sunshine. 

DST has a bit of a checkered past, accented by one of America’s “Founding Fathers.” It was 78-year-old Benjamin Franklin who first suggested changing the clocks in 1784.

 

Living in Paris while serving as the U.S. Ambassador to France, Franklin penned an essay that dealt with the thrift of natural vs. artificial lighting. 

Franklin rationalized that less fuel would be consumed in the lighting of oil lamps if there were an extra hour of daylight in the evening. 

He was quite appalled by the nocturnal tendencies of Europeans in those times. “They would stay up half the night and sleep until noon,” Franklin grumbled. Get the day started early, he suggested. 

In fact, Franklin proposed the regulation that “every morning as the sun shall rise, church bells and, if necessary, cannon shall inform the citizens of the advent of light and awaken the sluggards effectually and make them open their eyes….” 

Franklin was a morning person and made no bones about it. Two of his best quotations are: “Plough deep while sluggards sleep” and “the sleeping fox catches no poultry.” 

More than a century passed before Franklin’s idea resurfaced about 11,800 miles away from Paris in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, in 1895. 

A postal worker there named George Vernon Hudson was an amateur entomologist. He proposed moving clocks ahead by two hours in the spring, so he would have more time to hunt insects after work. The stodgy Royal Society of New Zealand squashed his idea, however.

 

No matter. Hudson still managed to “amass the finest and most perfect collection of New Zealand insects ever formed,” remarked Joe Satran of the HuffPost news website. 

DST was implemented as a fuel-saving measure during World War I in Europe in 1916, and the United States followed suit in 1918. DST was used again during World War II to save energy for war production, reported Anne Buckle of Time and Date, based in Stavanger, Norway.

She said: “The United States continued to observe daylight saving time after World War II, but there was no standard law about how to implement it. Different states did it at different times, which caused a lot of confusion. To prevent this from happening, a federal law was passed in 1966 standardizing the length and times of DST for the country.” 

So, most Americans have been springing forward/falling back now for 57 years. Isn’t it about time to “lock the clock” and make DST permanent? Consider the beauty of it: 

“Just as sunflowers turn their head to catch every sunbeam, so too have we discovered a simple way to get more from our sun,” reports the Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement of Rockville, Md. 

Early last year, the Sunshine Protection Act breezed through the U.S. Senate with bipartisan support, but the bill to observe DST year-round died on the vine in the U.S. House of Representatives. Why? 

The issue warrants additional discussion.