On Time

This time of year I always make the same mistake. I settle down for my regular 2.45pm dose of Champions League soccer on TV, only to find it is not on. Some minutes later, after trying different channels and checking schedules I remember that there are some weeks during March when the US has moved onto daylight savings time and Europe has not. An hour later my match starts.

I recall crossing the channel on a ferry once with my ex-wife. I remind her to move her watch forward an hour. She does so, and then muses “But what is the right time?” That innocent question entered family folklore, but actually it is rather a subtle one. What is the correct time?

So this March, after getting over my usual sulk about why America can’t just join the rest of the world and start their Daylight savings on the same day as Europe (after all, even the British have managed to converge on that one) I went onto Wikipedia to read up a bit on the subject.

The original definition of correct time at any point of longitude seems to be determined by the sun being at its highest at noon, thereby having equal amounts of light before and after noon. So, at Greenwich in London, when the UK is not on daylight savings, you can see the sun due south and at its zenith at exactly noon, and sunrise occurs the same time before noon as sunset does after it. The UK only has a limited spread of longitude, so that time was then used for the whole country.

Much of the world then followed this convention for a while, not surprisingly since at the time much of the map was coloured pink as part of the British Empire. At this point, Wikipedia yielded its first surprise. I was aware that India is now an anachronism since it is always half past some hour there when it is something o’clock everywhere else, but now I know that this used to apply to more places. Before Holland was overrun by Germany in 1940, it used to be on Amsterdam time, just twenty minutes ahead of London. Can you imagine early travellers having to adjust their timepieces by twenty minutes? Apparently Nepal is still operating on something and three quarters hours gap with London, which must be a nightmare for frequent travellers to Katmandu.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, two possible improvements were identified, which have complicated matters ever since.

First, people realized that the standard day for anyone not running a farm was skewed towards the afternoon. If you had exactly twelve hours daylight to enjoy, most of us would choose something like 7.30am to 7.30pm rather than 6am to 6pm. As a result, countries started swinging towards the Western side of their “correct” time zones. The fewer people work on farms as the years pass and the more work and social lives shift to evenings, the more pronounced this trend has become.

Then, someone in New Zealand proposed daylight savings time. When a day has only ten hours of daylight, 7am to 5pm is not a bad solution, but with fourteen hours, choosing 5am to 7pm seems a perverse waste of daylight. So, in places at latitudes far away from the equator, countries started to move the clocks in spring and autumn to allow longer summer evenings.

I can certainly testify that daylight hours make a difference. I vividly recall Swedish Decembers. Stockholm lies at the Eastern end of its time zone, so it would get dark around 2pm for a few sad weeks. Standing in the freezing cold for a child’s ice skating lesson would have been tough enough, without the added burden of early afternoon darkness. During those months we were permanently tired despite sleeping long hours. In the summer, we were lively even with less sleep. The body responded to the degree of daylight.

So far, this feels logical. Then compromise and politics takes over from logic. How much longitude should a country cover before employing multiple zones? Are farmers more important than kids’ safety (from more light morning journeys to school)?

According to Wikipedia, the safety arguments are not as clear-cut as you might think. There is some dispute about what traffic accidents can be attributed to darkness. Also, the Monday after the clocks go forward creates a spike of accidents as people drive less well from being sleep deprived. Again, I can understand that. Jet lag seems to last for ever when you travel across many time zones, but even a journey across just one zone creates some problems the next day.

Still, reading these arguments did not really convince me. As usual, lobbyists have been up to their tricks with selective statistics. Farmers are not the only powerful interest-group with an incentive. Think of all the media companies who have to plan and market schedules across multiple zones – this must add cost.

Some countries choose a single time even when spread across many theoretical zones. China is the largest of these. Seemingly, if you cross a border from China to Afghanistan, you don’t just have to adjust your watch by one hour, but by three and a half. Imagine that!

Hitler and his mate Franco were behind more than the change in the Netherlands. France and Spain were also forced to change to German time. In Spain’s case this puts them to the extreme Western edge of theoretically correct time. An argument is raging about whether to change back to UK (or Portuguese time). Seemingly, the status quo encourages lazy starts to a working day, longer lunch hours, unnecessary siestas, later finishes to working days leading to sacrifice of family time, lower female workforce participation and unhealthy late dinners and parties. That is quite a list of potential failings. Some go so far as to attribute the recent collapse of the Spanish economy in significant part to Spanish time practices.

I find this interesting. I do recall visiting Madrid to work in mid-winter and finding it freezing cold and dark in the mornings. I wonder if there is an East-West effect to match the North-South one of attitudes. In Scandinavia, people take vacation in July and start work early because they are trained to make hay while the sun shines – who knows what problems lie around the corner? This attitude evolves over hundreds of years, but might there be a similar effect where people on the western end of a zone develop more of a manãna attitude? That would be interesting to study.

Finally, consider how fraught this simple area is for politicians. It is just one other example of something where most will not have the courage to propose change, since any change will annoy someone any potentially cost votes. The Spanish campaign could easily become mired in memories of Franco.

It would be great if the world could at least agree some simple rules. Perhaps we could adjust all standard time zones one hour westwards. We could make a global o’clock time for all countries. We could even specify fixed dates (two in the North, two in the South) for all daylight savings adjustments. These steps would improve things for the world. But don’t hold your breath – there is next to no chance of such agreements taking place.

All this only makes me celebrate more what has been achieved in Europe over the last fifty years, and despair at the small-mindedness that resents anything at supra-national level. We can also celebrate areas where somehow uniformity has occurred, for example that all planes seem to have passenger exit doors on the same side. But if time zones are difficult, think how hard it must be to promote standards for weights and measures, or plug and socket shapes, let alone things like UN Security Council representation.