THROUGH
MOUNTAIN MISTS
Early Settlers of
Their
Descendants...Their Stories...Their Achievements
Lifting the
Mists of History on Their Way of Life
By: Ethelene Dyer Jones
Sunday, March 13
was that time
again--time to “spring forward” one hour in time, set our clocks ahead
and lose
one hour of much-needed sleep in the process.
If you’re like me,
you are probably still feeling the effects of this time disorientation,
the
loss of sleep, and in general getting your body in tune with a new
schedule
that means arising earlier, and, if you’re wise, going to bed earlier.
Researchers are now
conducting research to see how healthy time changes in the spring and
in the
fall are for us. Not absolutely
confirmed yet, with more research progressing, scientists who study the
effects
of time change on individuals have unveiled some interesting data.
The thesis is that
shifting our internal clocks twice a year has adverse effects on health
and
well-being. In the spring-forward mode,
sleep deprivation is a big loss which affects nearly everyone. Most people do not get enough sleep at best,
given factors that rob of rest and sleep.
When a “required” loss of sleep, such as moving the clock
forward a
whole hour occurs, it takes the body days, even weeks, to adjust. It is not likely in the fall when we “fall
back” an hour, that the body will adjust any better to new sleeping
patterns. Sleep deprivation, then, is one of the
first and most marked health issues
of time changes.
Another finding
published in the “Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics”
found that
abrupt time changes adversely affect mental function.
For example, when a control group of high
school students in Indiana were given the Scholastic Aptitude Test
(SAT)
shortly after the spring time change, the group dropped 16 points in
total test
scores following the loss of an hour of sleep.
Sleepy children in schools and less-alert workers at jobs also
take
tolls in mental acuity and work production.
Several studies
have found that traffic accidents increase by a sizeable percentage (in
Canada,
by 8%) after the spring time-forward.
Likewise, studies show that traffic accidents increase in the
fall when
dusk comes early and, after a long day, persons driving home in the
dark are
much more prone to have accidents.
A study in Sweden
revealed that heart attacks increased by at least 6% following the
time-forward
adjustment in spring.
I did a little
research to see when and why the laws adjusting time in spring and fall
came
about in the first place. Go back a long
time for the idea for this law, although it took years for the Congress
and
Presidents of the United States to act on the idea.
In 1784, America’s venerable Benjamin
Franklin, inventor, writer and U. S. Ambassador to France, came up with
the
idea for Daylight Saving Time. It
happened like this. Franklin had seen a
demonstration of a new kind of oil lamp in France that made a big
difference in
how a room was lighted. Franklin, who
was 78 at the time he wrote his tongue-in-cheek essays about time, also
liked
to stay up until the wee hours of the morning playing chess and other
board
games with his French friends, one of whom was Antoine Francois Cadet
de Vaux,
editor of “Journal de Paris.” Because of
his late-night habits, Franklin seldom saw the sun rise, but slept
until noon
or after.
After having seen
the famous oil lamp and how much light it furnished, Franklin awoke,
thinking
the lamps were on in his room. But he
had awakened early enough to see the dawning, with his shades open. He conceived the idea of how thrifty it would
be to make use of more daylight time rather than using so much fuel to
furnish
artificial light. And hence came the
concept of moving clocks forward to take advantage of daylight in the
spring,
and moving them back in the fall for the same reason.
His friend, Cadet de Vaux, published the
essays in a series entitled “An Economical Project.”
It was not,
however, until World War I that Franklin’s ideas, proposed in 1784 were
actually adopted. On April 30, 1916,
Germany and Austria advanced clocks one hour.
Several European countries followed suit, and the United States
changed
time two years later. The first law here
about moving the clocks forward an hour in the spring was made
effective on
March 19, 1918. President Woodrow Wilson
overrode the rule in 1919.
During World War
II, to save fuel and other economic aspects in the war effort, Daylight
Saving
Time was enacted from February 9, 1942 through September 30, 1945. President Franklin Roosevelt endorsed
it. Never completely happy with the time
change, after World War II citizens wanted “the old time” back. Again
in 1966
with the Uniform Time Act, the forward and backward setting of the
clocks was
again enacted. The law was revised in
1972 to move forward an hour on the first Sunday in April and to move
backward
the last Sunday in October. In 2005, the
Energy Policy Act began the time change on the second Sunday in March
and the
first Sunday in November, as the changes still occur.
Complain about it
as we may, have trouble adjusting to it as we do, and fearing the
hazards to
our health that research scientists have revealed,
time changes seem now to be a part of how
we are ordered to do things. And so, like
it or not, we adjust…and mark
our hours of daylight and darkness. Some
believe time change obliquely affects even the economy--not only in
saving
electricity and other fuel for lighting, but to provide more daylight
hours for
shoppers to go to stores and make purchases, thus boosting our
struggling
economy.
Flowers and plants
turn their heads to follow the sun and gain every ray possible from the
light. As we in turn spring forward and
fall back at the appropriate times, we, like the natural world, are
trying to
follow a way to get more benefits from sunlight hours.
[Ethelene Dyer
Jones is a retired educator,
freelance writer, poet, and historian. She may be reached at
e-mail edj0513@windstream.net;
phone 478-453-8751; or mail 1708 Cedarwood Road, Milledgeville, GA
31061-2411.]
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