SOMEWHERE IN TIME (WKZO AM/FM) — Now that the state has sprung forward to Daylight Saving Time, be sure to set the clocks that still need to be set manually ahead one hour and be sure to change the batteries in your smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors.
You will have one less hour to do it this weekend as we lose an hour this time.
The whole concept of switching time zones gets mixed reviews from Michiganders.
It means an hour of extra sunlight during those long summer evenings, but it means losing an hour in the morning for a while.
Benjamin Franklin is often cited as the first guy to have the idea, but some historians say he was just making a joke when he said the best way to save on candles in France was to just get the French out of bed an hour earlier.
The first suggestion that clocks be altered came in 1895 when Austrailian George Vernon Hudson suggested to the Wellington Philosophical Society that they shift two hours forward in October and two back in March. It never went anywhere.
Independently, a decade later, British Builder William Willett suggested moving clocks forward 20-minutes on each of the four Sundays in April and doing the reverse in September. It was rejected because of the resulting chaos it would have created.
The Germans were first to put it into wide practice as an effort to save energy during World War One. Other countries followed their lead, but abandoned DST after the war. It made its come back during World War II and this time it stuck.
In 2005, Congressman Fred Upton co-sponsored a bill that extended the daylight savings period by about three weeks to further enhance the energy savings. It’s disputed whether or not its had any real impact, depending how the study is set up.
Polls on its popularity also depend on how you phrase the question.
The biggest issues occur where time zones clash. It can be a problem for folks who live along the Southwest Michigan border with Indiana who have to do calculations any time they have an appointment across the border, because all the counties west of LaPorte County are on Central Time to allign with Chicago, it’s central economic hub, and all the counties east of St. Joseph county are on Eastern Standard Time .
For two weekend’s every year, we are all time travelers, at least when it comes to how we humans measure time. But time itself never really changes.
