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We'll Beat the Daylights Into YouMedieval clock pride leads to fierce independence in the twentieth century when time zones and daylight savings time are established. |
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This Under the Sun column published 10/29/2000
We all (well, most of us) got to sleep another hour this weekend. Why? Because in 1966, the US Congress got fed up with an enormous timekeeping mess whose origins reached all the way back to the thirteenth century. Its effects were far-reaching and odd; travelers had to reset watches, pedestrians died needlessly. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
It's the turn of the fifteenth century, and your little European burg wants what's de rigueur: a town clock. Such devices were hugely popular. When Britain's Windsor Castle got one installed around 1350 with a bell hammer that weighed 160 pounds everyone thought it was the cat's pajamas.[1] Edward III was sufficiently impressed with it that he had others built. France's Charles V did the same. Like the Guinness-record breaking balls of twine and plaques commemorating World's Biggest Pot of Chili that dot the western landscape of the United States, an enormous clock was what every medieval European town needed to put itself on the map and entrench itself in posterity. Such schemes work: you remember who's got the World's Biggest Ball of Twine, right?[2] Yeah, And Our Women Are Prettier, TooHowever impractical, such things were important. Cities began to compete in "our clock is bigger than yours" contests: in 1370, the city council of Schweidnitz in Silesia asked a clockmaker to construct "a clock equal to the one in [nearby] Breslau or better."[3] A cathedral in Chartes, France instructed the bellmaker of its clock to make the bell after the manner of the clock in the Palais in Paris or better. The sound shall be equally as beautiful and harmonious, in the proportion and amount of the metals shall be heavier than that in Paris.[4] Towns went into fiscal crises to produce such clocks; the construction of one in Montelimar, France nearly bankrupted the city in 1557. It would seem hard to justify the expense: after all, what was accurate timekeeping to a fourteenth-century European village? No matter. Local pride was at stake, and that was all anybody needed to defend the exorbitant price of a clock guaranteed to knock the socks off the yokels down the road. Such works were built "for the honor of the city and the utility and comfort of the citizens,"[5] although damned if we can figure how a gonging clock made fourteenth-century peasants more comfortable. Indeed, they sound more like humongous high school football stadiums in Texas: the things are used to capacity a few nights a year built at the expense of half the school's academic programs. In both cases, proponents found it easy to question the civic pride of the project's naysayers. However, shaming citizens into paying for it didn't always work. A clock in Slovakia, built in 1410, had one clock face with no hands pointed in the direction of the niggardly neighborhood that wouldn't assist financially in its construction. If they were unwilling to pay for the clock's construction, the argument went, they could damn well walk a few blocks to see what time it was. For the most part, though, the prestige associated with a town clock superseded any small-time fiscal concerns, and they were built. In some cases, more than one group in a town was working on one in a race to the finish.[6] Gearheads Go PostalThis led to an abundance of local clocks. Needless to say, it also led to a proliferation of local times, because the clocks were set to noon in town, which might be ten minutes off a town over the pass. Nobody really cared, at least, not until reliable postal service showed up. Couriers were supposed to wait for one another at a certain time at appointed stations, but who knew what time it really was? Was it noon here, or forty miles down the road? Postmen fiddled with their watches and tried to compensate as best they could. It didn't help much. At about the same time, in a distant America, Benjamin Franklin, penned a silly essay suggesting something like daylight savings time. As Franklin also wrote essays like "Fart Proudly", nobody paid attention. At least, not until the railroads showed up. Train travel posed a special problem. With time different in every town, how were travelers supposed to know if the train was on time, early, or late? How would the passengers make connections? Clocks were pretty accurate by then,[7] but accuracy alone didn't solve the problem. For awhile, trainfolk futzed with watches that had two faces; one for "local" time and one for "train" time, juggling both while trying to make the system work.[8] It was a pain and couldn't last. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the railroad industry began a massive campaign to standardize time zones, if only for the simple reason that they had to deal with the worst headaches. Turns out the way to do this would be to set a prime meridian, which is a starting point. You'd then determine all the other time zones relative to that one. What Time Is It? Let's VoteBy 1884, there was an international congress ready to get this cleared up once and for all. It had been spearheaded by far-thinking folks like Canadian railway engineer Sandford Fleming, who suggested that the entire world ought to be divided up into time zones (a contemporary geographer sniffed, "A capital plan for use during the millennium. Too perfect for the present state of humanity. See no more reason for considering Europe in the matter than for considering inhabitants of the planet Mars."). Skeptical geographers notwithstanding, the International Meridian Conference met in Washington, DC in October of 1884 to settle the matter.
Twenty-four countries showed up, and twenty-two voted in favor for Greenwich, just outside London, to be the starting point of the world's day. Greenwich had come against such weighty competition as the one of Great Pyramids, Jerusalem, and an uninhabited bit of the Bering Strait before someone pointed out that an observatory at the location might be useful for actually determining what time it was at ground zero. France abstained, suggesting darkly that it might have voted for Greenwich if Britain had accepted the metric system. Even so, France obstinately refused to cooperate until 1911, and even then only conceded to 9 minutes 12 seconds off Paris time, rather than just calling it Greenwich Mean Time. The French were by no means alone in ignoring the results of the Conference. China, for example, is on one time zone, despite crossing no less than five. Some People Are Never HappyEstablishing GMT itself was no picnic, either: the grumpy country of San Domingo (now defunct) voted against or abstained from nearly every resolution, including things as innocuous as suggesting a twenty-four hour day starting in Greenwich be incorporated whenever "found convenient". Liberia, after voting a resounding "yes" in all resolutions, didn't bother to incorporate GMT into its own timekeeping until 1972 (!). But for everyone else, despite objections (groused a Louisville, Kentucky, resident: "Now what is Greenwich to us? A dingy London suburb."[9]), GMT became the world standard. That's not to say it was always obeyed. Detroit, for example, kept local time until 1900, and for awhile after that half the city went on GMT and the other half stayed with local time. Shortly after this business went down (1907), a London builder named William Willett wrote a pamphlet called, "Waste of Daylight", and seriously tried to get daylight savings time implemented in Britain. He got laughed at. A lot. He rather courted disaster: when folks asked him why they should get up an hour earlier, he replied, "What?" Fortunately, those practical Germans realized that such a scheme would save on coal at night, and brought it into being. They figured that if everyone got up earlier, they would burn less fuel at night (and Germans don't fuel around). A Triumph of (In)ConvenienceA humiliated Britain followed suit, but not before Willett died. In 1918, the United States did the same thing, at least for seven months, after which folks got so fed up with it they repealed it right past a veto from then-President Wilson. It got reenacted during World War II, and continued, unabated and fiercely unregulated, until the 1960s. Towns still clung to that idea of local determination of time that reached into the roots of their pride, way back to the fourteenth century. Daylight savings was implemented and rescinded whenever an individual town felt like it, and, naturally, this caused some confusion. Reasons for its utility were varied: increased productivity, late evening light is enjoyable, and fewer traffic accidents.[10] Farmers complained; the Farm Bureau used to have strong anti-daylight savings time leanings (but not really any more: "I don't know that there's any strong feeling about it, one way or the other," recently said a spokesman for the Florida Farm Bureau[11]). As one might imagine, this caused a wide disparity in timekeeping from town to town. It got ugly. On a 35-mile stretch of highway in between Ohio and West Virginia, passengers had to sit through seven time changes. Fed up, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which effectively took the control of time out of the hands of small-minded townships. This pretty much settled things, except for the obstreperous states of Indiana and Arizona, both of which decided not to take advantage of daylight savings altogether (er, except certain parts of Indiana and the Navajo reservation in Arizona). This means, the argument goes, that Indiana and Arizona have higher utility bills and pedestrian traffic fatalities. And we say, let them languish in the dark ages with those towns trying to outclock one another. Like many other aspects of the global village, most civilized folks have come to drop their local pride in exchange for greater utility. You get an extra hour of sleep: who can argue with that? Just don't ask us what we think of this stuff in the spring. Footnotes
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