The sun’ll come out tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun!
Just what time that sun’ll come out is up to Congress.
Having balanced the budget, passed the SAVE Act and restricted insider trading by congressmen and congressional staffers, members of the House and the Senate are debating time itself. The issue is whether we should go to year-round daylight savings time, year-round standard time or just leave the whole thing alone and keep changing our clocks twice a year.
Yes, we are slaves to the clockmeisters in Washington who now force us to figure out how to set the time in our cars again. Every six months every driver in America re-discovers that he doesn’t know how to change the clock in his car.
Will we ever get relief from this twice-a-year agony?
This week, the House passed a bill to make daylight savings time permanent. Senator Tom Cotton, using those archaic Senate rules designed to make it more difficult to pass foolish but popular legislation, is clock-blocking adoption of a permanent daylight saving time.
Josh Barro tweeted, “This is exactly what happened in 1974—we have tried permanent daylight saving time before, and the House repealed it after a few months by a vote of 383-16 because it was widely hated. But some people refuse to learn history.”
But it wasn’t REAL clockunism.
Opponents of permanent DST say children will go to school in the dark. The idea of simply opening schools at 9 AM never occurs to them.
Can you tell that I am retired and don’t really care if the sun rises at 4 AM or 9 PM? I post my newsletters at 7 AM Eastern regardless of the position of the sun.
DST or Standard, the Early Bird specials at Golden Corral start at 2 PM pronto. The AARP generation will not abide any delays. Canes can hurt. Don’t make us prove it, young man.
We inherited this mess from those robber barons who ran the railroads in the 19th century—the Vanderbilts, the Goulds, the Huntingtons. There may have even been a Rothschild or two involved. You cannot have a good conspiracy theory without throwing in a Rothschild.
Life was simpler before those noisy infernal machines—Iron Horses—took over with their iron tracks and unsightly trestles. Noon was when the sun was at its highest in your town. Americans got along swell with more than 300 local times.
But then that darned Lincoln stuck his nose in and pushed for a transcontinental railroad. You would think that he had enough on his hands with civil war. But no.
The railroads discovered that running trains through 300 different local times is a nightmare. This directly contributed to collisions. A notable early example was the 1853 Providence & Worcester Railroad crash in Rhode Island, where a conductor misread time (due to local variations) led to a head-on collision killing 14 and injuring dozens. That year saw 11 major accidents killing 121 people.
The Brits—who had the first railway—had already done away with local times by adopting Greenwich Mean Time.
Cleveland Abbe, a noted astronomer and father of the National Weather Service, was among the scientists who suggested four time zones across the land. Time would make the railroads run on.
In April 1883, railroad executives met in St. Louis to discuss it. They met again that October, this time in Chicago, and decided that at noon on November 18, 1883, we would adopt Standard Time. In some cities, it became the Day With Two Noons as people had to set their clocks back to noon. Others had to go forward.
Some mourned the change. The Indianapolis Sentinel opined:
Railroad time is to the time of the future. The Sun is no longer to boss the job. People—all 55,000,000 of them—must eat, sleep and work as well as travel by railroad time. It is a revolt, a rebellion. The sun will be requested to rise and set by railroad time. The planets must, in the future, make their circuits by such timetables as railroad magnates arrange. People will have to marry by railroad time, and die by railroad time. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time—banks will open and close by railroad time—in fact, the Railroad Convention has taken charge of the time business, and the people may as well set about adjusting their affairs in accordance with its decree… . We presume the sun, moon and stars will make an attempt to ignore the orders of the Railroad Convention, but they, too, will have to give in at last.
The Indianapolis Sentinel’s time was up on February 25, 1906, when it ceased publication.
But most of those 55 million Americans really did not give it much thought. Standard Time was convenient and if there is one thing Americans agree on, it is convenience is a very convenient thing to have.
This was all done in the marketplace—a problem solved without a federal bureaucracy’s decree and without any congressional hearings.
All went swell for nearly 35 years until Congress stuck its nose in, using the excuse of entering the Great War, which we now call World War One. The Standard Time Act of 1918 formally adopted on March 15, 1918, the time everyone already was using—and replaced Standard Time with Daylight Saving Time.
That’s how government gets its kicks, by taking something that works perfectly well and fixing it. The people rebelled and Congress repealed it the next year. When World War Two began, Congress seized the opportunity to impose DST on us again.
By the way, Ben Franklin did not invent DST. He mocked it.
Franklin wrote a satirical essay in 1784 while in Paris, titled “An Economical Project,” published in the Journal de Paris. In it, he jokingly suggested that Parisians rise earlier with the sun to save on candle costs, proposing measures like taxing shutters or firing cannons at sunrise to wake people. He was poking fun at late risers and highlighting the value of natural light, not proposing a modern clock adjustment system.
It is rather difficult to adjust a sundial.
The sun will come out on Christmas Day in Poca, West Virginia. Whether the time is 7:38 AM or 8:38 AM is up to Congress. If only they invested as much time and effort into saving Social Security as they do in saving daylight.
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This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
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