The next time you find yourself carrying out
the twice-yearly ritual of trying to get every clock in your house to just show the same
number for once, rest assured you are but the latest in a long line of people who have
attempted–and ultimately failed–to make time perfectly obey human rules. Looking at you here, leap years. Every year, hundreds of millions of people
voluntarily turn their lives upside down by setting their clocks forward one hour in the
spring and back one hour in the autumn on a particular date mandated by the government
wherever they happen to live, unless that government is in one of these states, territories,
or countries that doesn’t play along. Because the only thing more confusing than
jumbling up every clock in the world is jumbling up some of them. Daylight saving time (yes, it’s singular,
not plural) is a perfect example of how a few people with the best of intentions can
end up annoying millions of the rest of us for the better part of a century. And it’s time we take an honest look at
how we got to this place where half the world comes unstuck in time twice a year, and ask
if the supposed advantages for springing forward and falling back still hold up… [MUSIC] Hey smart people, Joe here. Let's start with some history! The first person to dream up daylight saving
time was none other than Benjamin Franklin, who while living in Paris forgot to close
his shutters after a late night out and was rudely awakened by the sun at 6AM instead
of his usual hour of noon. He was astonished to realize that, in fact,
the sun makes light as soon as it rises and everyone was wasting beaucoup money spending
part of their waking hours in candlelight instead of taking advantage of the big bright
thing in the sky. [ROARING NOISE] He calculated between April and September
the people of Paris alone could save $200 million of today’s dollars by getting their
lazy bones out of bed to carpe more of the diem. But his solution didn’t involve shifting
the clocks, because in 1784 standardized time wasn’t even a thing, so instead he called
for cannons and church bells at sunrise. Much like the turkey as America’s national
bird, this Franklin idea did not catch on, but his goal was the same as every daylight
saving time crusader who came after him: Change the hours of human activity to make the best
use of daylight. Before the mid-1800s having a bunch of different
local times wasn’t a huge problem because it took days to go visit anyone anyway, but
once railroads started chugging suddenly everyone needed to agree what time it was or no one
would get anywhere. "Doc!" "Marty!" By 1872 railroads had declared over 70 different
official times in the U.S. alone, so in 1884 President Chester A. Arthur hosted a convention
where dozens of countries agreed Greenwich, England gets to be zero degrees longitude
and everyone established official time zones based on that. Except for France and Ireland, who hated the
British and used their own official time 9 and 25 minutes different from Greenwich, respectively,
until the 19-teens. In 1905 a New Zealand post office clerk named
George Hudson originated the modern idea of moving the clocks twice a year because he
secretly wanted more time to collect bugs after work, but the idea really took off a
few years later on a different set of islands, when William Willett, an English architect,
went out for a morning horse ride and got sad because his sleepyhead countrymen were
wasting a bunch of fine British daylight. Willett also secretly wanted more time to
play golf after work, and he published a pamphlet calling for a summer clock shift, promising
more time to exercise, work, and enjoy the daylight; cleaner skies from burning less
coal; boosts in health and happiness from breathing less of said coal smoke, and allegedly
better eyesight. He calculated that an hour clock shift would
add three years more daylight to your life by age 72. According to Willett, people already wound
their watches hundreds of times per year so changing what time it was should be no big
deal? But people were like “Uhh we just got everyone
on the same time a few years ago and now you want to go mess it up?” so Willett died
in 1915 without Daylight Saving Time becoming law. Today he’s buried under a sundial set to
Daylight Saving Time with a Latin inscription saying “I only count the sunny hours” Because Willett’s Daylight Saving movement
did finally start to catch on… in Germany, during World War I. See, the Germans, along with allies on their
side of the trenches, sprang the summer clocks forward to save energy for the war effort,
and Britain and the rest of Europe weren’t going to let the Germans have that advantage,
so they all enacted Willett’s time, only to immediately get rid of it when the war
ended in 1918. All this time, scientists knew moving numbers
around on a clock doesn’t actually save time, so they just followed Greenwich. But meanwhile over in the US, “Daylight
Clubs” had started springing up, and lobbying from manufacturing tycoons, labor unions,
and even baseball teams convinced President Woodrow Wilson to make Daylight Saving Time
federal law. As a child, you might have heard, like I did,
that Daylight Saving Time is for farmers. That’s a lie. Farmers hated the idea from the beginning,
because the rooster still crows at sunrise and cows need milking no matter what time
the clock says. American farmers hated it so much that rural
congresspeople got Daylight Saving Time overturned almost immediately. The next few decades were a huge mess. Some cities and states followed their own
time-changing laws and some didn’t, with only 1 in 4 Americans observing Daylight Saving
Time in the 1930s. And over in Europe, Germany had gotten rid
of it after the Great War, while the UK kept it, and France being France did both. Confused yet? You’re on the right track. World War II brought Daylight Saving back
again, but only temporarily, and in the US, the every town for itself policy continued
until, in 1964, Daylight Saving Time began on these dates and ended on these dates depending
on where you lived. Trains, planes, automobile drivers, and broadcasters
had had enough. Finally, in 1966, President Lyndon Johnson
signed Daylight Saving Time into law for the whole country. Importantly, states are allowed to exempt
themselves and stay on standard time – like Arizona and Hawaii do – but more on this
law later. Over in Europe, the 1970s energy crisis brought
daylight saving back, except for the UK who had never changed, and the EU made it the
official rule in 1996 nearly a century after it was first devised. This incredibly messy history was apparently
all necessary because daylight saving time supposedly comes with a ton of advantages. Supposedly. From World War I onward, saving energy by
using daylight instead of artificial light for more of our waking hours has been one
the main justifications. While that may be true in some places, summer
energy use actually goes up in others. Modern bulbs just don’t suck as much electricity
anymore, and while people have turned off some lights, they’ve turned on lots of air
conditioners, computers, and TVs. Even in places where it does save energy,
the effect is only a few dollars per household. If it’s not really about energy, what is
it about? Maybe money. Fast food restaurants and many retail businesses
originally got behind DST because they realized it meant more sales of burgers and ice cream
and everything else. And since increased sales at McDonald’s,
for example, leads to a greater demand for Kansas beef and Idaho potatoes, retail owners
became a powerful national political movement supporting not just the existence of but even
expanding DST. These days in the US it covers two-thirds
of the calendar year, with the extra month of evening light bringing in half a billion
dollars for the golf industry alone. But changing the hours of human activity to
make the best use of daylight does have some real non-capitalism-related advantages. People do spend more time outside, which for
those of you who never try it, I can assure you is pretty nice. More evening light also leads to fewer fatal
motor vehicle accidents. And while more artificial light in dark places
often doesn’t reduce crime, adding more daylight to the evening actually does reduce
crime. It’s the time changing that causes problems. It’s like voluntary jetlag. Literally NO ONE likes jetlag! Why would we do it to ourselves by choice?! Shifting the clock, whether it’s forward
or back, messes with our circadian rhythms, the natural chemical and cellular cycles that
control when we’re awake, which messes with the duration and quality of our sleep, and
being sleepy screws us up in a bunch of different ways: Sleep deprivation and sleep disruption in
the days after time changes leads to: More traffic accidents, more workplace injuries,
people spend more time than usual on the internet at work, it messes up how we make decisions
and can even lower stock market returns, judges give harsher punishments, people feel more
depressed when they fall back in the autumn, and the end of DST even leads to more people
hitting wildlife with their cars. Think of the animals, people! Major disasters, including the nuclear accident
at Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the Challenger space shuttle disaster
have been at least partly linked to insufficient sleep and disrupted circadian rhythms. All this changing back and forth, messing
with our brains and our sanity, is a problem. The solution? So glad you asked because I have a pamphlet
of my own. Take it. Permanent daylight saving time could be the
best solution. Set the clocks forward in the spring, get
the extra daylight when Earth is tilting that way, and just leave it. Except, here in the US at least, we can’t,
because of how the federal law about daylight saving time was written. States can only opt out of daylight saving
time, they can’t opt out of standard time to have daylight saving time year-round, not
without a change to federal law. In 2019, around half the states had considered
bills like this, but as of today in the US it’s literally illegal to make daylight
saving time permanent. If you think I'm kidding, I’m not. But many scientists who study our natural
biological rhythms think we should do the opposite, and stay on permanent Standard Time. Our body's biological clock might be set by
the sun, but our “social clock” is set by the rules that we make–going to school,
to work, etc. Getting up when it's dark to keep up with
social time is tough. And it’s hard to go to bed earlier if the
sun’s still out. You can end up with what's called a "social
jetlag," which has been linked to physical and mental health problems. According to these researchers, during Daylight
Saving Time, this social jetlag is worse. They say permanent standard time would put
our sun clock more in sync with the clock we all follow to be functional members of
society. But whatever solution you prefer, this biannual
clock switching needs to go. "It's time to stop! It's time to stop okay? No more!" EU countries seem to get it, and have voted
to get rid of the time-switching starting in 2021. But European countries will get to decide
whether to stay on their standard winter time or summer time, and thanks to Brexit the UK’s
clocks will be doing their own thing. We’re sorta right back where we were a hundred
years ago, with nice orderly time zones full of countries changing the clocks whenever
they feel like it. Now maybe that won’t be too big a problem. Most of our time-keeping devices are automatically
updated these days, but they rely on other computers to tell them it is, and it’s only
a matter of time with a jumbled system like this until something goes wrong in some computer
somewhere. I just hope it’s an Xbox and not a nuclear
power plant. This whole thing got started because most
of the world’s most powerful countries a hundred years ago just happened to be at latitudes
with long summer days and darker winters. But in a lot of the world this just makes
no sense, especially near the equator, where daylight doesn’t really change from day
to day. Perhaps, for the good of the vast majority
of people on Earth who already realize this clock switching is a silly idea, we should
truly seize the day and get ourselves to permanent DST ASAP. If you’ve seen my video about the invention
of the metric system, you know that the best intentions, executed poorly, can mess up history
and science in some significant and unexpected ways. And this is another good reminder that the
universe is a messy place that doesn’t follow human rules or always fit into our nice neat
organizational bins. Trust me, bending time to your will just doesn’t
work. We’ll be much better off changing ourselves
to make the most of our time. Stay curious. [MUSIC] And as always, a huge thank you to everyone
who supports the show on patreon. I think it's one of the best ways to carpe
your diem, and also help us keep making more videos. Just click on the link, check out our great
perks, we'd love to have you as part of our community. I did it on the first time!
