Listener Calls

NOTE: This episode is a rebroadcast. There may be minor differences between the episode and the transcript you see below.

BRIAN: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh, 20th Century Guy.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers, 19th Century Guy.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf, your guide to the 18th century. Today on the show, how people have sliced and diced the 24-hour day through all three of our centuries.

BRIAN: For the past few weeks, we’ve been soliciting your thoughts on the topic on our website, backstoryradio.org. One of the comments came from Karin in Montpelier, Vermont. We have Karin on the line now.

Welcome to the show.

KARIN: Well, thank you very much. It’s really neat to be talking to you guys.

ED: So what do you got for us?

KARIN: Well, I noticed with dismay that we’re coming up on daylight savings time again. And I was kind of calculating up, since they’ve expanded daylight savings time, we spend 2/3 of the year in altered time now.

PETER: Un-huh.

KARIN: And I’m trying to figure out how to get comfortable with that. I guess I’m an early riser. And I like it to be a little light when I get up.

PETER: OK.

KARIN: I don’t work in an office so I don’t mind if it gets dark at 5:00 or 5:30 or 6:00.

PETER: Right.

KARIN: I’m happy to go in the kitchen and start cooking supper. And it feels fine to me.

ED: Yeah, Karin, people like you and me, who get up really early in the morning, we’re not so happy about daylight savings time. And joining us Karin, are the farmers.

KARIN: We have a lot of dairy farmers.

ED: Yeah.

KARIN: And I think the cows completely don’t understand.

BRIAN: That’s exactly right. I mean where did daylight savings time come from in the first place? I mean I don’t think it was around back in my time, where we were in perfect synchronicity with the world around us. So why did you guys invent this?

ED: Well, I think we’ve got to throw that to Peter because we know who came up with the idea for daylight savings time.

PETER: Well, it was that visionary Ben Franklin. He was all over daylight savings time.

In 1784, in the Journal of Paris, he was writing about well, the way they kept their time in Paris. And what they did is to sleep all morning because they were up all night. And Franklin did one of these calculations, a characteristic Enlightenment thing. And he’d count the number of candles that had to burn to sustain this misuse of daylight. And it would be an immense savings to the French people.

And they were going into debt at this period, badly into debt. And it led to the French Revolution. So no French Revolution, if they had had daylight savings time.

ED: And they might not have sold Louisiana to us if they wouldn’t had to pay for those candles.

PETER: Absolutely.

ED: Franklin was the first to admit that he didn’t have the means to implement daylight savings time. So Karin, let’s put it Ed out of his misery. Daylight savings time in the United States started in 1918.

And there’s one thing that consistently in the 20th century got the whole country to go on daylight savings time and that was war. It was actually the Germans who first started daylight savings time in 1916.

BRIAN: So if we were going to fight, then we had to be on the same streets.

ED: Exactly.

PETER: Because you show at a battle and they wouldn’t be there.

ED: Well quite literally, the British did go on daylight savings time, a month later or very shortly after. The real point, Karin, is that Germany, Britain, the United States, go on daylight savings time because we can save energy. It was all about well, where are we spending most of our money on energy? And a lot of it was being spent on lighting when daylight savings time was first introduced and even during World War II.

Then we have this thing called air conditioning that comes along. So that when Richard Nixon, at the height of the energy crisis in the early 1970s, calls for extended daylight savings time, it’s not so clear that we’re really saving that much energy because people have started air conditioning their homes. They come home after work and if they’re in Dallas or Houston or Jacksonville, they turn on the air. And that uses a lot of energy.

KARIN: From that point of view, we would be smarter just to get up earlier in the morning and get some work done while it’s cool, wouldn’t we?

ED: Precisely.

KARIN: And as an early riser, I would think I’d be happy to say to everybody, hey, let’s get up and start work an hour earlier.

ED: I’m with you. I’m with you.

KARIN: And that’s what we do, we just don’t call it that. We could say let’s fool ourselves by setting the clock.

PETER: Well, Karin, I going to say something very radical here that will put this in a broader perspective. And that is time is a construction. It doesn’t exist in any real sense until we’ve defined and developed the metrics, the ways of articulating it, what time is. And so, when is when, depends on social convention. It’s an agreement we make.

And that was true from the beginning of time. Not time, itself, but time as measured. And so look, we live in a democracy, Karin. You have got to organize an anti-daylight savings party.

BRIAN: Yes. It starts here.

KARIN: No. We need a better name. I might call it the symmetrical noontime party.

ED: Oh, do.

KARIN: I would arrange it so that whenever the Sun was highest, that’s noon. And let the sun rise and sun set symmetrically either side of that, just for economic reasons.

BRIAN: I can see the flag. And it’s the SNP. You got take over, all right.

KARIN: Well, thank you very much.

PETER: All right. Thank you, Karin.

BRIAN: So long, Karin. Bye.

KARIN: Bye, bye.

PETER: So we’ve got another listener comment here that came in via email. Hey, Jess.

JESS ENGEBRETSON: Hey, guys.

PETER: This is Jess Engebretson, one of our producers. I believe she has that comment ready for us.

JESS ENGEBRETSON: Yeah. So this question comes from Michael in Pullman, Washington. And ironically enough, I tried to get him on the phone, but couldn’t make it happen because of the time difference. So instead, let me read you what he wrote.

PETER: Great.

JESS ENGEBRETSON: He says, I’m particularly interested in the evolving nature of public time keeping. Our university has removed all clocks, except the clock tower. Are public clocks necessary and how does our increasingly private reliance on our digital devices render public timekeeping superfluous or anachronistic? What about the lack of bells that signal the passage of time in public spaces?

ED: You know, this strikes as a great irony, Peter, that we talk about the centralization and the coordination of time. But in many ways, nothing was as centralized and coordinated as ye old medieval bell towers.

PETER: Right. Gather around folks. Find out what time it is.

ED: So I don’t know. I mean would it have been ubiquitous in colonial America? Would that have been a direct holdover? Or did our Protestant forebearers get rid of it?

PETER: No, Protestants are big in time. And there would be, in New England for instance, on the bigger churches at least, a parishioner might leave an endowment to have a clock. So yeah, there’s a central location where time is kept. And there’s a secular version of that in some big cities.

ED: So maybe what happens is that this is a kind of literacy. It’s not just a tolling of the bells that every peasant can hear. You literally have to look up and read the clock. You really have to learn how to tell time.

And it would have been something that children would have been learning earlier and earlier, right? So it’s a form of mass instruction. And I believe, over the course of the 19th century, that this would have just been more and more the case. And there would have been more and more private time keeping going along with public timekeeping,–

PETER: Along with it. Yeah, exactly.

ED: –rather than just more and more timekeeping.

BRIAN: I just kind of take issue with the premise in the question emailed to us. Because I actually think that digital time has become public time and it is publicly displayed.

I’m just struck when I walk around the grounds of UVA, at how many computer or TV screens I see. There isn’t one of them that doesn’t have the time prominently displayed. I am much more conscious of the time just walking from my lecture to my car, than I ever was 10 or 15 years ago.

PETER: I think we got time all over the place. You’re right Brian. It’s ubiquitous. What we’re missing now is place. We live in such a virtual world that we can’t locate it.

There is no place to go to where we’d all find out what time it is. So the only coordinate that we have is time. So time is everywhere. But public time and a space in which we read that time is, as Ed said–

BRIAN: And Peter, you can’t pin this one on me.

PETER: Yeah.

BRIAN: Let’s get together and blame Ed for this.

ED: Oh, wow.

BRIAN: Because I think the beginning of the erosion of those separate public places that stood for time, whether it’s the church or city hall, was really in the late 19th century, when commercial establishments began putting clocks on corners, especially jewelry stores, department stores.

PETER: A good point.

BRIAN: And it’s the market that begins to erode that distinction that you rightly point to.

ED: You’re almost right, Brian. Where is the one place that people would have gathered in the 19th century increasingly? It’s the railroad station.

PETER: Yeah.

ED: It’s the railroad station that really brings this grid to bear. It’s where the stuff shows up. It’s where the passengers show up. It’s where you got to be ready.

So I think you’re right, Brian. Then it spreads to other commercial districts. But it becomes more public. There’s more public places where it shows, before it becomes less.

PETER: And interestingly, those public spaces you’re talking about, those train stations, those were amazing places.

BRIAN: Cathedrals.

PETER: Yeah. That’s the word that was just coming into my mind, Brian. It’s exactly right. Well, how do we sustain those places and spaces today? How about airports?

BRIAN: And yet nowhere, as a frequent denizen of airports, I can tell you this, does time have a less visceral and dependable meaning. It’s whatever, when that screen flips over, it’s whatever the airlines say the time is.

And I find that time just expands and contracts to fit whatever. It’s mechanical, it’s weather, whatever. It’s an act of God, I’m in this building trapped, divorced from all outside world.

So Michael has really got us figuring on something important. Time is taking lots of different forms around us. And we could see with our very own eyes, it seems to be disappearing and reconstituting itself all around us.

ED: And Michael, you can set your watch by that, wherever it might be.

PETER: Well, look, we’re eager to hear your thoughts on today’s topic or for that matter, on any of our upcoming topics. Have a look at our website to see the topics we’re working on.

You can share your thoughts with us there or by leaving us a phone message. Our number is 434-240-1053. You can also tweet us at BackStoryRadio.