Daylight savings time: le temps perdu
As this morning’s French newspapers announced: “Ne vous trompez pas: dans la nuit de samedi à dimanche, on recule la montre d’une heure et on dort donc une heure de plus.”
Don’t f*** up – tonight the clocks go back an hour so we get an extra hour in bed! On change d’heure ce weekend!
“Passer à l’heure d’hiver” literally means to pass to the time (or hour) of winter. In other words, it’s about turning the clocks back to wintertime. This time shift is called le passage à l’heure d’hiver. And in six months’ time we’ll have passer à l’heure d’été.
So this is the point in autumn when we switch from “daylight saving time” to “normal time” or
- l’heure normale (“normal time”)
- l’heure d’hiver (“winter time”)
- l’heure légale (“legal time”)
The aim of all this tinkering around with our timepieces is to save energy, or so they say, and in France that’s the apparently the equivalent of the electricity consumption of an entire town of a quarter of a million people.
A 10-hour clock from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"
But I don’t know about you – I’ve always felt something strange at the back of my mind, as if we are somehow in a topsy-turvy story from Einstein. When the clocks go forwards or backwards, it’s as if we are fiddling with the time-space continuum.
Tomorrow morning at 3am (summer time) there will be an extra hour, because then it will be 2am again (but 2am winter time). Then at the end of summer the clocks jump forward again, and we “lose” an hour. Where does the extra hour come from? Where does the missing hour go?
What happens if, say, you are a Dublin nightclub with a licence to stay open and serve drinks until 3am? Do you stay open for an extra hour, because it’s 3am twice? In that “extra” hour do you travel back in time?
“Don’t forget to set your clocks back by one hour on Sunday 25th October 2009 and gain an extra hour for that extended lie-in.
“Better yet, use your extra hour to make the most of the wide range of events and activities taking place across London, be it something spooky for Halloween, a night on the tiles, a quality feed or even something more cultured. You can find a whole host of events and venues by clicking the links below.”
- A London tourism website on how to “get more” out of events in that extra hour
Time and nature
When the clocks jump forwards or backwards, nature doesn’t. It’s not as if we’re pushing the Earth forwards or backwards. We still carry on revolving around the Sun at mcuh the same rate as we did the night before.
It’s about imposing our own order on nature – changing our social habits. It’s generally about getting up later or earlier, adding a bit more daylight to the afternoons for the sake of the retailers (rather than the farmers).
If shifting clocks back and forth seems unusual, bear in mind that the idea of a “standard” time within a nation didn’t really exist until the railways around the 1840s. Even then, local time ruled in many places in the UK (which then included Ireland), and standard time only finally became law until 1880.
While Benjamin Franklin was an American envoy to France, he wrote an anonymous letter to the letters page of the Journal de Paris in 1784 about daylight saving. He argued that Parisians should cut down on on candles by rising earlier, taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise.
The Republican Calendar
The Republican 10-hour clock that never quite caught on
If Franklin’s modest proposal seems a bit daft, thnk about the new calendar that the authorities brought in shortly after the French Revolution.
It had new names for the days and months, each month became 10-day weeks, and the revolutionary calendar broke these down using a strict decimal system:
- Each day was divided into 10 hours
- Each hour had 100 decimal minutes
- Each decimal minute had 100 decimal seconds
Therefore the new revolutionary hour was over twice as long as a conventional hour. They even made a new type of clock to display this decimal time, but it never caught on. The calendar itself was abandoned in 1806.
Time during wartime
Then the UK adopted daylight saving time (DST) in 1916 because the Germans introduced it in 1915, and they were worried about whether the German factories were becoming more efficient and conserving their coal supplies.
Then some countries had DST, or dropped it, and had it again, until the EU standardised things in the 1990s.
Even so, it’s one thing to have different time zones across Europe (Ireland is in what I suspect is the Sherry-Drinking Time Zone, which we share with the UK, Portugal and the Canary Islands). It’s quite another to keep changing what time it is within your zone every six months or so. Here’s a site that lists which countries switch to DST and when.
So do we really need all this messing about with our sleep patterns and computer systems and the very notion of Time in our societies, just to make sure capitalism can do its job? One French lobby group doesn’t think so: it’s called l’Association contre l’heure d’été double (ACHED).
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