Daylight Savings Time

I was just listening to a podcast where the hosts were discussing the origins of daylight savings time. One of the hosts said that originally daylight savings time was concieved by Ben Franklin while he was in France. The idea was that people would get to sleep the same amount but would use less candles and thereby save money. It got me to thinking about daylight savings time and its relevance to the modern world. I wonder just how much energy we save? I suppose in Ben Franklin's time most people did a lot of work by natural light and used candles, which were probably fairly expensive in relation to overall costs, only in hours of darkness. A reduction in candle wax costs was probably significant. Today, people use lights even in the day time. I used to work in a office where we had to shut down when the electricity was off. Not so much because of the computers being down, but because there was virtually no natural light in most of the cubicles. How much money are we actually saving by having a extra hour of daylight for working? I doubt that it is even worth the effort expended to reset all those clocks.

Then I got to thinking about the fact that congress voted last year to change the effective dates for daylight savings time. Why? If it makes a difference now, why have they waited this long to change the dates? After all the length of days has not changed has it? I expect that the hours of daylight on November 13th this year and next year will be about the same as it was on November 13th, 100 years ago. After thinking about if for a while, I decided that they changed the effective dates because they could. It seems to be important to congress and state legislatures to always be changing things. For the better, for the worse or just for the change. They appear to want to make sure that WE realize that THEY call the shots.

I suspect that we could all do just as well if daylight savings time was eliminated altogether or if it was put in effect for 365 days per year, but after a while everyone would forget that it was established by an edict of congress. We could not have that now could we.