It is Sunday Morning and if You Didn’t Reset Your Clock You are Already Late

We don't know what old Indian allegedly said it but versions of this have been floating around for decades mocking Daylight Savings Time.  Gotta admit whoever said it, he had a point.

If your forgot to re-set your clocks last night, you are probably already late for church or at least late retrieving the Sunday paper from the stoop.  It happens every year, no matter how many announcements are made on the TV news, radio, newspapers, and now by cute Facebook memes.  And some of the folks who did fiddle with their time pieces got it wrong—is it spring forward, fall back or the other way around?

It’s vexing.  And some think, foolish.  Take to oft quoted bit of folk wisdom usually ascribed to some Native American sage—Daylight Savings Time is like cutting a strip off the bottom of the blanket and sewing it to the top and thinking you have a longer blanket.

Perhaps.  But maybe there is something to it.  People have been doing it, or something very like it, for a long time.

Roman water clocks operated on some version of water dripping from an inverted cone and filling a cistern.  In this ingenious device the pointing figure is on a float and as water rises in the cistern to gestures to wrings on the cone.  On many such clock the rings, or marks in the cistern itself, were numbered with winter and summer hours, leading archeologists to determine that something analogous to Daylight Savings Time was in use in the Empire for at least part of its existence.

Way back when togas were in fashion, those wily old Romans had water clocks inscribed with two sets of numerals—one for summer and one for winter.  And all of those years when there essentially were no clocks, peasants and farmers regulated their lives by the sun—beginning their days with its rise and ending their labors with its setting.  All pretty much the same idea as DST.

In the U.S. Benjamin Franklin usually gets the credit--or the blame--for Daylight Savings Time.  But no one acted on his proposal for about 150 years.

Benjamin Franklin, an early riser and frugal man, is sometimes credited with the idea.  He wanted to save money on candles.  Minister to France in 1782 he found time to publish an essay, An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light.  He proposed adjusting hours to rise earlier in the warm months so that work could be illuminated through an open window, not by costly beeswax candles.  But no one took him up on his utilitarian proposal.

A similar notion was floated by New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson more than a century later in 1895.  In a paper presented to the Wellington Philosophical Society he proposed a two-hour shift forward in October and a two-hour shift back in March. There was some interest, but two hours probably seemed like a drastic, wrenching change.  Nobody picked up his idea.

William Willett tirelessly promoted Daylight Savings Time in Britain for 15 years.  But it took the Great Wat time and Imperial Germany acting first to get his country temporally on board as a war measure.  And by then he was dead anyhow.

In 1905 Englishman William Willett came up with a gentler approach.  He proposed moving the clocks 20 minutes forward each of four Sundays in April and switching them back by the same amount on four Sundays in September.  This, he reasoned would allow for gradual adjustment, much the same as naturally rising and beginning work with the Sun.  Liberal Member of Parliament Robert Pearce introduced the first Daylight Saving Bill to the House of Commons on February 12, 1908.  And there it languished, year after year despite constant lobbying and public appeals by Willett right up to his death in 1915.

As is so often the case, it took a war to accelerate innovation.  World War I, to be exact.  Imperial German instituted Sommerzeit—Summertime—as a fuel conservation war measure on April 30, 1916.  Britain and France soon followed.  Russia did it in 1917.  And when the U.S. decided to go Over There, the Wilson administration adopted it in 1918.

                                                    It took an elaborate propaganda campaign to promote Day Light Savings time in the U.S during World War I.

The United States quickly abandoned Daylight Savings time after the war.  Farmers, who had once regulated their lives by the sun, now complained that the cows needed milking and the chickens demanded to be fed at set, familiar hours which were disrupted by the sudden hour changes.  But then farmers tend to be traditionalists and despise any change.  But they were a powerful political force.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed, War Time on February 9, 1939.  It essentially was year-round Daylight Savings Time.  In Britain, where fuel was at a premium, Double Summer Time was applied which moved the clocks two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) during the summer and one hour ahead of GMT during the winter.  America abandoned its War Time in September of 1945.

After the War, many states, and sometime local jurisdictions, continued to use Daylight Savings Time in the warmer months.  Starting and ending dates varied and the result was a patch work map of Daylight and Standard Time.  It was hell for railroads and airlines, who needed consistent schedules, inconvenient for the national broadcasting networks, and a pain in the ass a lot of folks who found their jobs and residences in different times.

A clamor grew to straighten the whole damn mess out.  But no compromise could be found between those who wanted to return to year-round Standard Time and those who wanted uniform Daylight Savings Time in warmer months.

Congress finally adopted the Uniform Time Act of 1966 providing that DST would begin on the last Sunday of April and end on the last Sunday of October. States could, however, still opt out by passing a local law.

And of course, some did.  It led to problems.  Indiana, in thrall to it farmers stubbornly clung to Standard Time.  Most of the state was in the Eastern Zone.  But a corner of the state around Gary and Hammond in the northwest was in the Central Zone.  That meant when DST would go into effect in neighboring Illinois, the area became an island out of sync with both the rest of its state and with the Chicago metropolitan area with which it was economically tied.  Similar time islands were found elsewhere.

After the Energy Crisis brought about by the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, Congress passed emergency legislation extending uniform Daylight Savings time for 10 months in 1974.  After howls of protest that children were waiting for school busses in the dark, that was rolled back to 8 months a year later.  In ’76 DST reverted to beginning on the last Sunday in April.

But Congress was not done tinkering.  Energy conservation benefits of DST were evident.  In 1985 it pushed the start date back to the first Sunday in April.  The Energy Policy Act of 2005 extended DST by about one month starting on the second Sunday in March and ending on the first Sunday in November. That went into effect in 2007.

Daylight Savings Time still has its critics.

Today, most of the US observes DST except for Hawaii and most of Arizona, and Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Guam.

And, oh yeah folks from Gary no longer have to change their watches every time they drive across the Illinois border.

 

Sunday Morning—If You Didn’t Reset Your Clock, You are Already Late

Daylight Savings time begins.  The cock will crow an hour later.

If your forgot to re-set your clocks last night, you are probably already late for church or at least late retrieving the Sunday paper from the stoop.  It happens every year, no matter how many announcements are made on the TV news, radio, newspapers, and now by cute Facebook memes.  And some of the folks who did fiddle with their time pieces get it wrong—is it spring forward, fall back or the other way around?

It’s vexing.  And some think, foolish.  Take to oft quoted bit of folk wisdom usually ascribed to some Native American sage—Daylight Savings Time is like cutting a strip off the bottom of the blanket and sewing it to the top and thinking you have a longer blanket.

Perhaps.  But maybe there is something to it.  People have been doing it, or something very like it, for a long time.

\

Roman water clocks operated on some version of water dripping from an inverted cone and filling a cistern.  In this ingenious device the pointing figure is on a float and as water rises in the cistern to gestures to wrings on the cone.  On many such clock the rings, or marks in the cistern itself, were numbered with winter and summer hours, leading archeologists to determine that something analogous to Daylight Savings Time was in use in the Empire for at least part of its existence.

Way back when togas were in fashion, those wily old Romans had water clocks inscribed with two sets of numerals—one for summer and one for winter.  And all of those years when there essentially were no clocks, peasants and farmers regulated their lives by the sun—beginning their days with its rise and ending their labors with its setting.  All pretty much the same idea as DST.

In the U.S. Benjamin Franklin usually gets the credit--or the blame--for Daylight Savings Time.  But no one acted on his proposal for about 150 years.

Benjamin Franklin, an early riser and frugal man, is sometimes credited with the idea.  He wanted to save money on candles.  Minister to France in 1782 he found time to publish an essay, An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light.  He proposed adjusting hours to rise earlier in the warm months so that work could be illuminated through an open window, not by costly bee’s wax candles.  But no one took him up on his utilitarian proposal.

A similar notion was floated by New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson more than a century later in 1895.  In a paper presented to the Wellington Philosophical Society he proposed a two-hour shift forward in October and a two-hour shift back in March. There was some interest, but two hours probably seemed like a drastic, wrenching change.  Nobody picked up his idea.

William Willett tirelessly promoted Daylight Savings Time in Britain for 15 years.  But it took the Great Wat time and Imperial Germany acting first to get his country temporally on board as a war measure.  And by then he was dead anyhow.

In 1905 Englishman William Willett came up with a gentler approach.  He proposed moving the clocks 20 minutes forward each of four Sundays in April, and switching them back by the same amount on four Sundays in September.  This, he reasoned would allow for gradual adjustment, much the same as naturally rising and beginning work with the Sun.  Liberal Member of Parliament Robert Pearce introduced the first Daylight Saving Bill to the House of Commons on February 12, 1908.  And there it languished, year after year despite constant lobbying and public appeals by Willett right up to his death in 1915.

As is so often the case, it took a war to accelerate innovation.  World War I, to be exact.  Imperial German instituted Sommerzeit—Summer Time—as a fuel conservation war measure on April 30, 1916.  Britain and France soon followed.  Russia did it in 1917.  And when the U.S. decided to go Over There, the Wilson administration adopted it in 1918.

It took an elaborate propaganda campaign to promote Day Light Savings time in the U.S during World War I.

The United States quickly abandoned Daylight Savings time after the war.  Farmers, who had once regulated their lives by the sun, now complained that the cows needed milking and the chickens demanded to be fed at set, familiar hours which were disrupted by the sudden hour changes.  But then farmers tend to be traditionalists and despise any change.  But they were a powerful political force.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed, War Time on February 9, 1939.  It essentially was year-round Daylight Savings Time.  In Britain, where fuel was at a premium, Double Summer Time was applied which moved the clocks two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)  during the summer and one hour ahead of GMT during the winter.  America abandoned its War Time in September of 1945.

After the War, many states, and sometime local jurisdictions, continued to use Daylight Savings Time in the warmer months.  Starting and ending dates varied and the result was a patch work map of Daylight and Standard Time.  It was hell on railroads and airlines, who needed consistent schedules, inconvenient for the national broadcasting networks, and a pain in the ass a lot of folks who found their jobs and residences in different times.

A clamor grew to straighten the whole damn mess out.  But no compromise could be found between those who wanted to return to year-round Standard Time and those who wanted uniform Daylight Savings Time in warmer months.

Congress finally adopted the Uniform Time Act of 1966 providing that DST would begin on the last Sunday of April and end on the last Sunday of October. States could, however, still opt out by passing a local law.

We don't know what old Indian allegedly said it but versions of this have been floating around for decades mocking Daylight Savings Time.  Gotta admit whoever said it, he had a point.

And of course, some did.  It led to problems.  Indiana, in thrall to it farmers stubbornly clung to Standard Time.  Most of the state was in the Eastern Zone.  But a corner of the state around Gary and Hammond in the northwest was in the Central Zone.  That meant when DST would go into effect in neighboring Illinois, the area became an island out of sync with both the rest of its state and with the Chicago metropolitan area with which it was economically tied.  Similar time islands were found elsewhere.

After the Energy Crisis brought about by the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, Congress passed emergency legislation extending uniform Daylight Savings time for 10 months in 1974.  After howls of protest that children were waiting for school busses in the dark, that was rolled back to 8 months a year later.  In ’76 DST reverted to beginning on the last Sunday in April.

But Congress was not done tinkering.  Energy conservation benefits of DST were evident.  In 1985 it pushed the start date back to the first Sunday in April.  The Energy Policy Act of 2005 extended DST by about one month starting on the second Sunday in March and ending on the first Sunday in November. That went into effect in 2007.

Daylight Savings Time still has its critics.

Today most of the US observes DST except for Hawaii and most of Arizona, and Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Guam.

And, oh year folks from Gary no longer have to change their watches every time they drive across the Illinois border. 

If You Didn’t Reset Your Clock, You are Already Late

In the U.S. especially Benjamin Franklin usually gets the credit--or the balame--for Daylight Savingstime.  But no one acted on his proposal for about 150 years.

If you forgot to reset your clocks last night, you are probably already late for church or at least late retrieving the Sunday paper from the stoop.  It happens every year, no matter how many announcements are made on the TV news, radio, newspapers, and now by cute Facebook memes.  And some of the folks who did fiddle with their timepieces get it wrong—is it spring forward, fall back or the other way around?

It’s vexing.  And some think, foolish.  Take to oft quoted bit of folk wisdom usually ascribed to some Native American sage—Daylight Savings Time is like cutting a strip off the bottom of the blanket and sewing it to the top and thinking you have a longer blanket.

Perhaps.  But maybe there is something to it.  People have been doing it, or something very like it, for a long time.

Roman water clocks operated on some version of water dripping from an inverted cone and filling a cistern.  In this ingenius device the pointing figure is on a float and as water rises in the cistern to jestures to wrings on the cone.  On many such closck the rings, or marks in the cistern itself, were numbered with winter and summer hours, leading archeologists to determine that something analogous to Daylight Savings Time was in use in the Empire for at least part of its existance.

Way back when togas were in fashion, those wily old Romans had water clocks inscribed with two sets of numerals—one for summer and one for winter.  And all of those years when there essentially were no clocks, peasants and farmers regulated their lives by the sun—beginning their days with its rise and ending their labors with its setting.  All pretty much the same idea as DST.

Benjamin Franklin, an early riser and frugal man, is sometimes credited with the idea.  He wanted to save money on candles.  Minister to France in 1782 he found time to publish an essay, An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light.  He proposed adjusting hours to rise earlier in the warm months so that work could be illuminated through an open window, not by costly bee’s wax candles.  But no one took him up on his utilitarian proposal.

A similar notion was floated by New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson more than a century later in 1895.  In a paper presented to the Wellington Philosophical Society he proposed a two-hour shift forward in October and a two-hour shift back in March. There was some interest, but two hours probably seemed like a drastic, wrenching change.  Nobody picked up his idea.

Daylight Savings Time tirelessly promoted Daylight Savings tim in Britain for 15 years.  But it took the Great Wat time he was dead.ar and Imperial Germany acting first to get his country temporily on board as a war measure.  And by then he was dead anyhow.

In 1905 Englishman William Willett came up with a gentler approach.  He proposed moving the clocks 20 minutes forward each of four Sundays in April, and switching them back by the same amount on four Sundays in September.  This, he reasoned would allow for gradual adjustment, much the same as naturally rising and beginning work with the Sun.  Liberal Member of Parliament Robert Pearce introduced the first Daylight Saving Bill to the House of Commons on February 12, 1908.  And there it languished, year after year despite constant lobbying and public appeals by Willett right up to his death in 1915.

As is so often the case, it took a war to accelerate innovation.  World War I, to be exact.  Imperial German instituted Sommerzeit—Summer Time—as a fuel conservation war measure on April 30, 1916.  Britain and France soon followed.  Russia did it in 1917.  And when the U.S. decided to go Over There, the Wilson administration adopted it in 1918.

It took an elaborate propaganda campaign to promote Day Light Savings time in the U.S during World War I.

The United States quickly abandoned Daylight Savings time after the war.  Farmers, who had once regulated their lives by the sun, now complained that the cows needed milking and the chickens demanded to be fed at set, familiar hours which were disrupted by the sudden hour changes.  But then farmers tend to be traditionalists and despise any change.  But they were a powerful political force.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed, War Time on February 9, 1939.  It essentially was year-round Daylight Savings Time.  In Britain, where fuel was at a premium, Double Summer Time was applied which moved the clocks two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)  during the summer and one hour ahead of GMT during the winter.  America abandoned its War Time in September of 1945.

After the War, many states, and sometime local jurisdictions, continued to use Daylight Savings Time in the warmer months.  Starting and ending dates varied and the result was a patch work map of Daylight and Standard Time.  It was hell on railroads and airlines, who needed consistent schedules, inconvenient for the national broadcasting networks, and a pain in the ass a lot of folks who found their jobs and residences in different times.

A clamor grew to straighten the whole damn mess out.  But no compromise could be found between those who wanted to return to year-round Standard Time and those who wanted uniform Daylight Savings Time in warmer months.

Congress finally adopted the Uniform Time Act of 1966 providing that DST would begin on the last Sunday of April and end on the last Sunday of October. States could, however, still opt out by passing a local law.

And of course, some did.  It led to problems.  Indiana, in thrall to it farmers stubbornly clung to Standard Time.  Most of the state was in the Eastern Zone.  But a corner of the state around Gary and Hammond in the northwest was in the Central Zone.  That meant when DST would go into effect in neighboring Illinois, the area became an island out of sync with both the rest of its state and with the Chicago metropolitan area with which it was economically tied.  Similar time islands were found elsewhere.

After the Energy Crisis brought about by the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, Congress passed emergency legislation extending uniform Daylight Savings time for 10 months in 1974.  After howls of protest that children were waiting for school busses in the dark, that was rolled back to 8 months a year later.  In ’76 DST reverted to beginning on the last Sunday in April.

Daylight Savings Time still has its critics.

But Congress was not done tinkering.  Energy conservation benefits of DST were evident.  In 1985 it pushed the start date back to the first Sunday in April.  The Energy Policy Act of 2005 extended DST by about one month starting on the second Sunday in March and ending on the first Sunday in November. That went into effect in 2007.

Today most of the US observes DST except for Hawaii and most of Arizona, and Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Guam.

And, oh year folks from Gary no longer have to change their watches every time they drive across the Illinois border.

Very Bad Day at the Summer Resort—Pompeii, 79 AD

The Eruption of Vesuvius by Edward Turner, early 19th Century.

On August 23, 79 AD by traditional accounts Mount Vesuvius near the shores of the Bay of Naples erupted destroying of the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.  The destruction of the cities was known through an eyewitness account of the eruption from across the bay by then 17 year old Pliny the Younger, later a noted historian in his own right, in letters to the historian Tacitus. 

The letters described the fate of his uncle Pliny the Elder, commander of the Roman Navy on the bay, who attempted to rescue friends by boat but was trapped on land by unfavorable winds and died the next day, probably of inhaling the toxic fumes of the eruption.  The Elder was only one of tens of thousands of victims. 

Vesuvius is one of the most active and dangerous volcanoes in the world, then and now.  Not only does it erupt frequently, it is apt to explode violently, as it did that year first sending up a huge column of ash, expelling rocks and boulders, and the sending waves of deadly pyroclastic flow—fast-moving currents of hot gas and rock—which travel down the slope of the volcanic cone at speeds generally as great as 450 mph.  The gas can reach temperatures of 1,830 °F. 

The region was unsteady due to volcanic activity.  Ancients told of earlier eruptions and the Greek demigod Hercules was associated with the volcano.  The town of Herculaneum, a sea port, was named for him.  Vesuvius was associated with Jove and his cult centered in the area. 

Earthquakes were common.  Seven years earlier a large quake heavily damaged Pompeii, and some areas of the city had still not been repaired.  But the towns had been resettled and residents grew used to regular tremors.  These intensified in the days before the eruption. 

Residents were at first unconcerned with the eruption, but were soon thrown into a panic as rock and heavy ash began descending on them.  Those who could attempted to escape.  Some made it to boats in the bay, others escaped by land.  But many were still trapped when the pyroclastic flow engulfed the cities, killing anyone in its path.  Within days both cities were completely buried in ash. 

Over time the exact location of the cities were lost.  

Vesuvius today still looms over the ruins of Pompeii.  It is still active and one day may well bury the city again.

Vesuvius continued to erupt regularly, although never as violently as in 79 AD.  Eruptions were recorded in 787, 968, 991, 999, 1007 and 1036.  After a period of relative quiet a new spate of eruptions started in 1631 and was followed by events in 1660, 1682, 1694, 1698, 1707, 1737, 1760, 1767, 1779, 1794, 1822, 1834, 1839, 1850, 1855, 1861, 1868, 1872, 1906, 1926, 1929, and 1944 with the mountain “smoking” and regular earthquakes in between.  The volcano has not erupted since 1944. 

It remains the most active volcano in the world and sits in a densely populated region with 600,000 people living in the so-called Red Zone on the slopes of the mountain or in likely kill zone of another major pyroclastic flow.  

Sexually explicit frescoes like this so shocked Catholic sensibilities that ruins were ordered reburied or walls were plastered over to prevent them from corrupting the morals of those why laid eyes on them.

The two Roman towns were buried by up to 75 feet of ash in the original eruption and further burred over time.  In 1599 a worker digging a tunnel discovered walls covered in frescos, including one that bore the inscription decurio Pompeii—the town councilor of Pompeii—but an architect examining the findings did not connect it with the rumored ancient city.  Shocked by the erotic content of the frescoes, he ordered the ruins reburied and they were forgotten again.

Herculaneum was rediscovered in 1738 by workmen digging for the foundations of a summer palace for Charles of Bourbon, King of Naples. Pompeii was rediscovered as the result of intentional excavations in 1748 by the Spanish military engineer Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre.  Charles, later King of Spain, took an interest in the antiquities discovered, ordered the areas preserved, and began the first excavations to unearth the towns. 

Those highly sexual frescos and even common kitchen items incorporating phallic motifs were frequently reburied or even plastered over in the early years.  The sexual mores of the Romans, at least those who could afford the luxury of summering at the resort city of Pompeii, were looser than anything then—or now.  Some of the repeating phallic imagery, however, has been attributed to fertility cults rather than sexual libertinism.   

Some of this material was still not regularly available for public viewing until the year 2000 and still requires minors get parental permission.  Christian moralists have long argued that Pompeii represented a later day Sodom and Gomorra and was destroyed by God’s wrath. 

Today, even after more than 200 years of excavations less than 20% of the total areas of the two cities have been uncovered.  But what has been found presents an astonishing glimpse of well preserved everyday life in the early Roman Empire down to the discovery that graffiti was common.  Hundreds of remains have been found intact, preserved where they fell by the ash.  The skeletal remains of others have been discovered still cloaked in the remnants of clothing and wearing jewelry.  Castings made of the dead where they fell have become a tourist attraction.  

Rapidly falling ash quickly buried victims and preserved many of their bodies in the final moment of their lives as they were overcome by the hot, poisonous gasses.  Plaster castings like this one are on display in Pompeii.

Both archeological sites have been declared World Heritage Sites by the United Nations.  A large number of artifacts from Pompeii are preserved in the Naples National Archaeological Museum and about 20% of excavated Pompeii can be visited by tourists.  Both sites are now within the boundaries of Italy’s Vesuvius National Park.  Park authorities have stopped most new digging to preserve the site.  Whether the archeological treasure—and the modern towns that surround it—can survive a future eruption of sleeping Vesuvius is open to question.