An Hour of Light for an Hour of Night

It’s Daylight Savings Time again. The adjustment, while routine now, was not always so easy to accommodate.

In 1942, a mother sought to re-set her infant son’s clock incrementally, about a minute per day. The February 28, 1942 New Yorker reported that by February 9th she’d tweaked his schedule by an hour. Not until she saw her husband set the clocks an hour ahead did she realize her mistake. She’d set his schedule back an hour, not forward. “She figures she’ll have him set right by May.”

The initial attempt to shift our clocks an hour twice a year came from England. Railways, farmers, scientists and other critics kept William Willett from tampering with time. He first envisioned the scheme in 1905. Only after Germany tried it during WWI, after Willett’s death, did the British set their clocks ahead as a war-time economizing measure in May, 1916.

A week or so later, in the US, explains David Prerau in Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time, a group convened in New York City. They formed the National Daylight Saving Association. In Boston, a group including A. Lincoln Filene of bargain clothing fame issued a report, “An Hour of Light for an Hour of Night.” Their argument for Daylight Saving Time included reasons like more accidents occurring under artificial lighting, that is, at night.

Weeks after the US entered WWI, in 1917, a Daylight Saving Time bill came before Congress. The American Railway Association fought it (millions of clocks would need changing, among other logistical logjams) but conceded traffic was lightest at 2 a.m. It took another year to pass but clocks started their spring jump at 2 a.m. Sunday, March 31, 1918.

Critics abounded, but there were celebrations apace. In Manhattan, people watched the change of the clock on the Metropolitan Tower on Madison Square. People gathered in nearby hotels, in Madison Square Park, in the streets. The Boy Scouts paraded. So too the NYPD Band. In Brooklyn, an equally festive scene occurred at Borough Hall.

Thus 2 a.m. has been the time to spring forward or fall back ever since.

While 2 a.m. seems a fine time to shift the clock to those of us who are asleep, the stretch and shrink of light and dark affects those who work nights. In winter, they hardly see the sun. In the brighter months, it creates the strange sensation of starting the nightshift when it’s still light out. On a movie set, this means less time to get those night shots, well, at night.

In England, writes Prerau, nightshift workers at the Devonport Dockyard wanted to be paid for the hour that sprang them forward to 3 a.m. in 1916. Two years later, in the US, nightshift workers were told their shift would extend an hour, till 9 a.m. instead of 8 a.m.

But even those who don’t work nights feel the effects of changing clocks twice a year. (That is, unless you live near the equator, or Arizona, or Hawaii, or any of the other places in the world that don’t follow Daylight Saving Time.)

In one curious example, The New Yorker reported on July 17, 1926 about a woman who lived at the Plaza Hotel on a nightshift schedule. The relatively new Daylight Saving Time kept her oversleeping past her normal waking time of 5:30 p.m. She ate breakfast at 7, a.m. And lunch at 12, midnight. At 2, a.m., her chauffer took her for a drive in the park. “After this she writes letters until dinnertime, just before dawn. We hasten to add that this must not be lightly put down as an instance of metropolitan depravity. The lady’s habits are regular and she rarely stays up later than eight or nine A.M.”