The Time Has Come

Early this morning, those of us who remembered to set our clocks forward for daylight savings time woke up an hour earlier than the day before.

The theory is reminiscent of the fellow whose feet stuck out from his blanket. To remedy the situation, he cut a foot off the top of the blanket and sewed it to the bottom.

There should be a better way.

Why, for example, can't we just have daylight savings time year round?

Some say it's because the cows get confused about their milking time. I never saw a cow that could read a clock.

Then there are those who say it confuses the roosters.

Maybe we should recall how we got time zones in the first place. It wasn't for the cows or the roosters. It was for the railroads.

Before the railroads, every large European or American town had its own time. Time was told by the sun dial. Noon was when the sun crossed the meridian. (That's why morning time is denominated "ante meridian" and afternoon is "post meridian.")

Even sailing ships told time by the sun. Navigators used their best estimate of the ship's longitude, compared that to the Greenwich (or other) hour angle of the sun and calculated when the sun would be overhead. With the sextant, the navigator observed the sun's elevation. When it ceased increasing, he would declare that local apparent noon had arrived and (with the captain's permission) strike eight bells. The hour glass was turned and that became the beginning point for the next twenty four hours. So each ship carried a little bubble of time with it across the ocean.

So it was with every town. Each town had its own little time zone, based on its longitude. Church bells called the faithful to morning and evening prayers, sent the peasants into the fields and the workers to their tasks. It didn't matter if the next town was on a slightly different time.

Then came the railroad. It began to matter a great deal that one town's clock was five or ten or fifteen minutes different from the next town's clock. Printed train schedules became confusing.

To fix this problem, national railroads developed railroad time. When railroads began spanning continents as in America and Russia, railroad time became divided into zones.

In this day of computers, I see no reason we couldn't return to the prior arrangement of truly local time. Computers would have no trouble keeping track.

We already have a way that keeps track of time for events spanning many time zones. It is called Greenwich Mean Time. Since the dawn of radio communications, the US Navy has used GMT to keep track of messages, assigning a "date time group" to each message, based on the originator and the dtg of the message. It avoids confusion.

Ship and aircraft tracks use GMT. You can do the same with your GPS.

So why not a system based on GMT (using the 24-hour clock) coupled with real local sun time? To avoid confusing travelers, telephone cell systems could broadcast both GMT and LST. The change might even create a new market for time pieces designed to display GMT and LST.

And it wouldn't confuse cows or roosters.