I can thoroughly recommend a really good book (I'm only half way through it) that was suggested to me by another member of this list.
"Saving the Daylight" by David Prerau. My thoughts at present are that a number of issues have really driven the widespread adoption of DST: The realization that noon to noon differed at different times of the year. Hence the adoption of "Mean Time". Railways needed to standardise time ~ even more in "wide" counties like the US and Russia than in the UK. Hence the adoption of time zones. Noon (by the sun) was not customarily in the middle of the working day. Various working groups &/or employers can see an economic benefit to maintaining solar time or changing the clocks. DST was first proposed by Benjamin Franklin in 1784. He failed to get it the idea adopted. Later it was championed by William Willett in the UK early in the 20th century. He gained much support and spent a great deal of his own money promoting the idea. He failed to get it adopted though it was brought to the UK parliaments several times. The Kaiser adopted the idea in April 1916 to help the war effort and the UK followed suit almost immediately. It seems that the UK, like Russia, might once again be thinking about permanent DST. Sundials tell the time by the sun, clocks tell us how we should co-ordinate activities with other people. OK I've probably now shown that I need to finish reading the book! Andrew -----Original Message----- From: sundial-boun...@uni-koeln.de [mailto:sundial-boun...@uni-koeln.de] On Behalf Of Frank King Sent: 27 March 2011 12:20 To: Reinhold Kriegler Cc: sund...@rrz.uni-koeln.de Subject: Re: AW: Year-round day saving time Dear Reinhold, I see you are trying to provoke me... > Frank King will tell us perhaps a nice sounding Latin expression?! This is the worst day of the year for me, truly... Dies irae, dies illa... The day of wrath, that day... :-) Or, perhaps, you seek my thoughts on whoever first decided that daylight saving time saves any daylight... Contemni est gravius stultitiae quam percuti To a fool it is worse to be in receipt of contempt than to be thrashed. I am not familiar with the Bremen cow but I am sure she deserves my sympathy as do the even more famous Bremen donkey, dog, cat and hen, your Stadtmusikanten. As well as sympathising with all the livestock in Bremen I am 95% with Mike Shaw... > I'm losing a lot of my potential time in the sun today sitting indoors > changing all my clocks. Don't bother Mike. Leave them at GMT! Oh. One more thing. Mike says... > If we ignore refraction effects, everywhere gets an average of 12 > hours per day with the sun above the horizon, doesn't it? Not quite true. We in the northern hemisphere average rather more than 12 hours per day because the sun has a positive declination for about a week longer each year than it has a negative declination. I extend my sympathy to those readers who live in the antipodes. Frank --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
