David Prerau

I fully expected that this book—like daylight saving time itself—would make me want to set my hair on fire. But Prerau managed to write a dispassionate and very detailed history of the biannual lunacy that is DST, from its origins (not what you think!) to the "clock chaos" that was the norm through many decades in the mid-twentieth century as officials at the local, state, and national levels battled over whether and when DST would be implemented. Prerau augments the official debates show more with a healthy dose of anecdotal accounts from newspapers and other sources, which make for a welcome human element to the story.

My one quibble with the book is that Prerau doesn't treat the effects of DST changes in any great depth, although perhaps it is the case that many of those studies have come out since the original publication of the book. We now know much more about the detrimental nature of sudden time changes; those effects, combined with the general idiocy of such a thing, ought to be enough to begin a strong push once again to get rid of DST once and for all (or, rather, to get rid of the time changes; I would have no objection to permanent DST, it's the switches to which I object).

Anyway, if you want a sense of why we do this ridiculous thing every year, this is an excellent book to start with. show less

Nice little microhistory of the struggle to save the world a little energy and a lot of frustration by making time uniform within time zones. Most countries in the world that aren't equatorial or majority rural/farming use daylight saving time. It makes lots of sense. I hate the day of the change, too, but really it's just not in question, with over 100 years of evidence, that following DST is a net benefit in energy savings and safety increases for all modes of transportation.

Needless to show more say, pockets of resistance in the US are GOP-led and/or religious nuts. The state of Arizona, in its desert-sunstruck glory, has a point in avoiding extra sunlight hours. Still and all, no matter what, the story of the people who created the concept and rammed it down the throats of the populace is really involving. Not sorry I read it.

The missing stars are all for the repetitive nature of telling a small story like this at too great a length. I think you'd need to be as interested as I am in the strange corners of Time to find it a good read...on balance, I liked it but expect that most others might not. show less

I enjoyed this natural history of daylight saving time, which was indeed contentious. The basic argument against it seems to have been that God's time is superior to man's time. War and commerce have provided the most compelling arguments for man's time (that is, artificial on a fixed schedule rather than artificial on local schedules). Those of us who remember the U.S. energy crisis of the mid-70's probably also remember the extension of daylight saving time and how unnatural it seemed. I show more myself wrote a letter to President Carter about being a child standing in the dark waiting for my school bus. For some people living at the advent of daylight saving efforts, the experience seemed even more unnatural. However, we would find their notion of naturalness fairly bizarre, as illustrated by this excerpt:

When the railroads in a country established a single time standard, several othger institutions quickly adopted railroad time for their own purposes. Even so, local time continued in extensive use as well. Railroad passengers still had to account for local time as well as railroad time as they moved between trains and towns. Some watchmakers began making watches with two dials, one for local time and one for railroad time, and the great Tom Tower Clock, in Oxford, England, was fitted with two minute hands. In an effort to be comprehensive, one British railroad timetable in 1840 informed passengers, "London time is kept at all stations on the railroad, which is 4 minutes earlier than Reading time, 5 1/2 minutes before Steventon time, 7 1/2 minutes before Cirencester time, 8 minutes before Chippenham time, and 14 minutes before Bridgewater time. (p. 36)

Now you know why so many early British detective novels hinged on train schedules.

Though the ostensive topic may seem arcane, the abstract topics are not: Artificial versus Divine, universal versus national, and the power of war and business to force changes in the infrastructure to serve their purposes. show less

I thought I was relatively well-informed about timezones, daylight saving and the changes that have taken place over the years. This book rapidly made it clear to me that I wasn't, but having read it I'm much better informed than I was. Not that I know everything in it, because this book is crammed with facts and anecdotes, far too many to recall. It's well-written enough that this doesn't make it difficult reading, though.

It has the sense of pace and story that the best of popular science show more books have, but it also has a richness of references and precision about its sources that many of these books lack. Whilst not adopting the conventions of an academic text, with numbered references, it's pretty easy to determine the source for just about any of the facts and anecdotes in the book, and the index is also useful and comprehensive.

The book begins with Benjamin Franklin's calculations in the 18th century that the Parisians could save the equivalent of $200m a year by changing the clocks and hence using fewer candles (the knock-on effects on unemployed candle-makers aren't considered, it seems.) It follows the story of William Willett who campaigned for many years to introduce DST, which eventually was only implemented as the result of war. And it then takes us through the confusing and often humourous fate of DST from the early part of the 20th century to 2006.

The author has made very good use of newspapers as sources for the effects of DST and the debates - often highly localised - about its introduction. We learn of the time in 1950 when Minonk, Illinois, accidentally began DST a week earlier than the rest of the state, for instance.

The book has an undoubted US bias, although it is not parochial - it covers the UK and Germany in some detail, and occasional tables throughout the book tell us which countries in the world were using DST at different decades in history, and even covers the situation in Antarctica. But the detail, the anecdotes, and the quotes from legislation, are almost entirely from the USA.

Even with that caveat, this is an excellent source book for anyone wanting to know about the history of daylight saving time and an entertaining read for anyone with an interest in timekeeping, calendars or social history. show less