“Only the government would believe you can cut a foot off the bottom of a blanket, sew it onto the top of the blanket, and have a longer blanket.”     Anonymous

It almost sounds fun.

“Spring forward, Fall back.”

Short, clever, catchy.

But it’s not fun. It’s annoying and confusing, a bi-annual irritation imposed on a complacent people by faceless bureaucrats and over-reaching pencil-pushers presuming to regulate the fourth dimension for reasons never made entirely clear.

At present, daylight saving time – or “summer time” as  it’s more casually known – in the United States and Canada begins on the second Sunday in March and runs through the first Sunday in November, which begs the question why the remaining one-third of the calendar gets to be called “standard” time. Semantics aside, DST has been a seasonal – and until recently only occasional – fact of American life for the better part of a century. Then again, the modern impulse to micromanage Nature is not so surprising when one considers that Mankind has been sticking it to Chronos almost since the beginning of…er…time.

The first solid evidence of time standardization dates to about 2,000 BC when the Sumerians invented the sundial and instituted the 12-hour day. Thing was, as the days grew longer, the practical-minded Sumerians simply let the hours grow with them, an admirably flexible time-keeping system that left the description of sunlight hours to the…um…Sun.

“Daylight time, a monstrosity in timekeeping.”     Harry S. Truman

About 4,000 years later, a New Zealander named George Hudson decided we could go the timeless majesty of celestial mechanics one better. Hudson was an amateur entomologist with a day job who spent evenings rooting about the North Island landscape for interesting bugs to classify. In 1895 he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society advocating a seasonal two-hour shift.

George Hudson

Although Hudson’s bold proposal never made it out of committee, the notion was picked up in 1905 by Englishman and avid golfer William Willett, who abhorred the sight of able-bodied Londoners unproductively idling in bed on sunny summer mornings almost as much as he hated having his 18 holes interrupted by thoughtless dusk. Willett was a man of some stature within the Empire and in 1908 managed to get a Daylight Saving Bill before the assembled House of Commons. While the bill never found sufficient Parliamentary support to become law, its principles found favor elsewhere within the Empire. In 1911, the mayor of Orillia, Ontario, one William Sword Frost, adopted daylight saving time within the borders of that fair city. When Frost left office in 1912, DST left with him.

War saved daylight saving time. Imperial Germany and its ally, Austria-Hungary, instituted the practice during the Great War in hopes of saving coal, and the Allied Nations soon followed suit. Winston Churchill was a staunch DST promoter during the Second World War, arguing that it enlarged “opportunities for the pursuit of health and happiness.” Detractors argued it was a bloody nuisance.

“An extra yawn one morning in the springtime, an extra snooze one night in the autumn is all that we ask in return for dazzling gifts. We borrow an hour one night in April; we pay it back with golden interest five months later.”     Winston Churchill

These days, countries from Sweden to Samoa and from the Netherlands to Namibia change their clocks twice a year. For what it’s worth, more countries don’t practice daylight saving than do, and many others – including China and Russia – gave it a test drive and then gave it up as not worth the hassles. Thanks to their relatively stable solar environment, very few people living between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn has ever been told to Spring or Fall anywhere.

America’s experience with time-tampering affords many excellent examples of the hassles that can happen when the thinking classes are allowed to complicate the simple. Officially established on these shores in 1918 as a wartime measure to conserve resources, daylight saving time was quickly abandoned when peace broke out later that same year and public enthusiasm for clock-resetting dimmed – except in New York City, which retained daylight saving so Wall Street could more easily stay in synch with European markets, and in Chicago and Cleveland which kept the practice to stay in synch with New York City.

Following a short second national act during World War II, the concept was firmly tabled from coast to coast until the 1970s when meddling economists proposed that DST might in some way alleviate the energy crisis. Arizona and Michigan formally opted out of the program, and then Michigan opted back in. Indiana, which has knowingly and with malice aforethought apportioned itself into two different time zones, bounced in and out of daylight saving on a county-by-county basis until the state legislature made DST the law of that still-divided land in 2005. And, for awhile there, Minneapolis and St. Paul were separated by both one river and one hour. Long scheduled from the first Sunday in April until the last Sunday in October, daylight saving’s current dimensions were established by act of Congress in 2007, a tweak purported to reduce dependence on incandescent lighting and strongly supported by proto-helicopter-parents demanding an “extra hour of daylight” on Halloween.

“I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind.”      Robertson Davies

In general, agriculture doesn’t like DST. In general, industry does. Environmentalists and energy watchdogs maintain that daylight saving time conserves energy and reduces carbon emissions, but numerous public and private studies have failed to persuasively quantify any such benefits. Many DST proponents insist that clock-changing saves lives by giving commuters an extra hour of daylight driving. Interestingly, one governmental study found that while there does seem to be a very slight dip in traffic fatalities over the course of DST, there is a significant increase in car crashes in the two weeks immediately following its annual implementation that experts ascribe to fatigue resulting from disrupted sleep patterns.

Biologically, more time in the sunshine means more nourishing vitamin D. It also means a higher risk of skin cancer. Some research suggests that rising earlier eases depression. Other research suggests that going to bed earlier makes depression worse. A whole bunch of research finds as much as a 10 percent increase in heart attacks during the three weeks following a time change.

Humans are an adaptable species, thank goodness, and being made to Spring and Fall every year of our nasty, brutish and short lives is a small price to pay in return for conquering the darkness and triumphing over time itself.

Unless we’re not.

“You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe Daylight Saving Time.”     Dave Barry