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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public Radio. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions from inquisitive kids around the world, and we find people who really know their stuff to offer some answers.
If you live in North America or many parts of Europe, New Zealand, parts of Australia, and some parts of South America, you recently went through a seasonal tradition, moving your clocks ahead or behind by an hour. It's called Daylight Saving Time.
In the Northern Hemisphere, which includes the United States and Canada and Europe, we just ended daylight saving time. And in Brazil and southeastern states in Australia and in Chile, you recently began your period of daylight savings. But what is daylight saving? It's really just a trick. Back to our head scratcher for today. We got this question about the strange phenomenon that so many of us participate in.
Hi, my name is Judah. I live in Los Angeles, California. I am seven years old. My question is, why do we have Daylight Savings? We wondered the same thing, so we called on someone who's written a whole book about it. I'm Michael Downing, and I'm the author of Spring Forward, the Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. Why do we have Daylight Savings?
Oh Judah, everyone in America wants to know why we have daylight saving, and no one really does. But here are two simple answers. One is, we have it because people noticed that in the summertime, when the sun rises earlier, people tended to sleep while the sun was out, and that seemed to be a waste of our natural resources. So if we turned our clocks ahead, that hour of sunlight would
would be available to us after school or after work and people would go outside and people thought that would promote being healthy participating in sports so that was one big reason and then the second reason is that shop owners and people who own stores and other businesses
realized that if that same hour of sunlight was given to workers at the end of the day, they would stop and shop on their way home. So people bought more things and businesses liked that. So those were the two main reasons we have daylight saving. So what we mean when we say daylight saving time is that we have shifted our clocks so that more people are awake and able to take advantage of an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day in summertime when we have long days.
And then in the wintertime, we go back to what is called standard time. And the sun rises a little earlier in the morning and sets a little earlier at night. But before we go any further, let's answer a question from Holly, who lives in Dublin, Ireland, and wants to get a little more information about this idea of day and daylight itself. Hello, my name
Holly, and I am six years old, and my question is, why are the days longer in summer and they're shorter in winter? Why are the days longer in summer and shorter in winter? Well, there are a number of reasons for that, Holly, but the simplest reason is that our Earth...
is not a perfect circle and our orbit around the Sun is not a perfect circle. So in winter, we're actually farther away and tilted away from the Sun and in the summer our planet tilts back toward the Sun and gets a little nearer. So we get more sunlight as we pass through that part of the year
And then every winter we lose a little bit more of that daylight. Does that make sense, Holly? In the wintertime, right now in the northern hemisphere where you are, the part of the Earth that you live on is tilted further away from the sun. So there are fewer hours in each day, each rotation of the Earth, where Dublin is in the path of the sunlight. And since the sun is lower in the sky, its light is less strong and it's colder.
Here's the funny thing, though, about the way we talk about this. We say the days are shorter. But if a day is 24 hours, whether it's summertime or wintertime, it's not that the days are actually shorter. It's just that there are fewer hours of daylight and more hours of darkness. Time is still the same. It's how we perceive it that changes. It's absolutely true that we think of a day being when brightness is available to us, when sunlight is available to us.
And in fact, that is a confusion because we know we have 24 hours of day every single day of the year. But it might also explain why so many people, particularly those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, look forward to summer because it seems to us our days are much longer if we have those late summer sunsets.
Yeah, and we should point out, we know that some of our listeners are in places like Sweden and Denmark and maybe northern Russia and maybe the southern part of Patagonia. And your days and nights are not necessarily light and dark at the same time as people who are living in Ecuador and Mexico and Kenya. Well, you know, the problem of time around the world is really interesting if you think about it.
because not only do the southern hemisphere have winter when we in the north are having our summer, so it's totally the opposite of what we expect to be normal because of where we happen to live, but it's also true that what looks like 10 o'clock to us, let's say in Boston, doesn't look like 10 o'clock in Los Angeles because it turns out that we have divided the world up into time zones and
to try to make sense of the way we are going to communicate with each other and trade with each other. But in fact, we could say there's only one day all around the world, one 24-hour clock going on all the time. And if we think about it, when the sun is up here, it's still the same day when it's dark in the southern hemisphere. So the problem of time goes beyond daylight saving and goes all the way back to trying to understand how we can...
get us all together on a single clock and make sense of that around the world. Yeah, now you're sort of blowing my mind because this idea of time, whether it's man-made or natural, you know, we have different ways of calculating time depending on how we're thinking about it. So who in the world does daylight saving time and changes this idea of the clock by an hour forward and then an hour back?
Well, about half of the world's population uses some form of daylight saving time. And most of us who use it are in the northern hemisphere, where there are the greater amounts of population crowded into those cities and countries that have short days during the winter and very cold winters. So it seems to me that
Part of the reason so much of the Northern Hemisphere uses it is because of how much we look forward to summer. But many countries, particularly near the equator, that are clustered around the center of the globe, don't use daylight saving time at all because there, day and night is equal number of hours almost throughout the year. So it doesn't make much sense for people who live near the center of the globe.
In fact, we don't even do it universally in the United States. And universally means everywhere or everybody. In some cases, it's a little bit depending on where you live, whether you do it, right? That's right. Well, there is really only one of the 48 states that we call the continental states that doesn't use daylight saving, and that's Arizona, which has always thought that it didn't need more sunlight in the summer and has refused to go along with the rest of the country.
But Hawaii does not practice daylight saving either because it's one of those places in the world right near the equator, and so it doesn't make any sense for them since they wouldn't save any daylight since almost every day has 12 hours of light in Hawaii. And some communities make a decision not to change as well. The state government might decide to change, but I can remember traveling through some Amish communities in parts of the United States, and they didn't necessarily follow daylight savings time.
Yeah, well, there was a time until about 50 years ago, there was no national policy. We didn't all have the same law for daylight saving.
The problem with that, as you can imagine, is it got confusing to know if some people turned their clocks ahead and some people didn't, what time it was anywhere. So we had trains that would leave New York and they wouldn't know what time it was in Chicago when they got there. So it got sort of confusing. And that's really why...
The Congress has tried to keep all the country together because, you know, the only real use of clock time is that it's the same wherever you are. So it's predictable when we travel or when we trade goods. So we've generally agreed on how we're going to tell time and we've standardized it or made rules that everyone follows. So we know what time it is in Des Moines and Dakar and Dar es Salaam and Dover.
But we don't all want to share the same clock, the same time zone, because then it might be dark all day in one country and light all night. So we created these things called time zones. That's why when it's 6 a.m. here in Vermont, where I am, it's 8 p.m. in Tokyo, Japan. And the time zones generally follow the sunlight so that you can have most of your day in the sunlight.
So we have also agreed on time zones. And within our countries, we've generally agreed on whether or not we follow daylight saving time and change our clocks in the springtime to get an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day. But we don't have to agree about how we feel about this or how it affects our sleep when we change the clocks. My name is Emma and I am six years old from Shreveport, Louisiana.
And I like Daylight Savings Time because I slept in a little to 6:24 when I usually wake up at 6. My name's Jaffa and I'm 7 years old. And I think Daylight Savings Time is cool because you get to stay up an hour later. Hi, my name is Nephilee and I'm from Seattle.
And how daylight saving time affects my sleep. It's really weird because I know it's supposed to feel like 8, feels like 9. But for some reason I've had more energy when I wake up in the morning. I'm less tired than I usually am. I always feel like a grizzly bear, but now I feel normal.
My name is Juna. I live in Atascadero, California, and I am 10 years old.
Light saving day changed my sleep schedule because I woke up an hour earlier than usual. I don't think I like light saving day. Thanks very much to the four of you for sending us your feelings and your experiences with changing the clocks. Coming up, why do we still do daylight savings if it's a trick? We'll find out.
This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids. I'm Jane Lindholm. We are talking today with Michael Downing. He's the author of Spring Forward, the annual madness of daylight saving time. It's worth noting that daylight saving time is actually a fairly recent invention. We started doing daylight saving time in the United States during the First World War when
We were trying to save some energy, that natural resource of sunlight, for the war effort. That's really what the goal was. And we were following England and Germany and other European nations who had started this war long before America got into it.
And then when we got in, we thought we would try the same plan they were all using. Most European countries started in 1916. The United States started in 1918. And it was designed as a way to conserve energy costs because a lot of energy was going towards fighting the war. But why have we stuck with it?
While a lot of countries and states have kept it for a few years and then gotten rid of it and then started up again and so forth, it's really confusing. Even in the United States, there was a long time where states and towns could decide for themselves whether they wanted to change the clocks or stay the same all year round. And that caused all kinds of problems, since no one knew what time it was anywhere else. So it's been pretty standard since 1974.
But again, why do we still want to do this? Michael Downing says a lot of it comes down to money. Many businesses really do make a profit because we have that extra hour of light in the evening. In the summertime. That's right. If you go outside in the summer, you play sports, you might go to the ballpark, you might have to mow the lawn, somebody might look at the house and think it needs a new coat of paint.
And all of the stores that provide all of those things tend to make more money every time we use daylight saving. So small businesses around the country really favor daylight saving. And I think there's another reason we tend to love daylight saving.
And that's simply because in the summertime, most kids are not in school anymore and having more time at the end of the day to be outside, often at the beach or to go to a lake, or just be outside for that extra hour until the sun sets, we start to think that's kind of our natural right and we don't want to give up our hour. What are the downsides? Well, there are a couple of problems with daylight saving. And one of them is that
We now do daylight saving not just four months a year or five months a year or six months a year as we did when we first started it long ago. Now we do it for eight months a year. So for many people just in the United States and around the world,
We have very, very dark mornings in different parts of the country thanks to daylight saving in March and in November. So that's one of the problems with it. It's also daylight saving is a problem also
for people who are religious and who pray according to sunrise times and sunset times because every time you change the clock, you change their habits for praying. So there are some real objections to daylight saving. Michael, do you think we're going to keep it or is there any chance that someday we would drop daylight saving? Well, every year, some people who seem to get tired of fiddling with their clocks think it's time to get rid of daylight saving.
But the history of daylight saving tells us that about every 20 years, we actually add an extra month.
to how long we use daylight saving. So I think, if anything, we're just going to get more and more of daylight saving. Well, so, okay, this is where I always get confused because I can never remember which one is daylight saving and which one is supposedly standard time. So in the summertime, that's daylight saving. And what you're saying is we have eight months where we have this change in what would ordinarily
ordinarily be our clock. So if we keep going in that direction, don't we someday get to 12 months and then we're just in daylight saving 100% of the time? Well, that's exactly right. If you think about it, what we used to call standard time, just regular old time,
Well, now, because we only use that four months a year, daylight saving time has become our new standard time. It's the regular thing. So I think we are nearly there. Well, engage in a thought experiment with me then, or sort of a philosophical physics idea. Have we changed time then if we suddenly decide to just go to daylight saving permanently? Well, here's the funny thing about daylight saving.
It's really just a trick. We just trick ourselves by moving the clock ahead. We don't change a thing, right? So even if we went to 12 months, we just went to daylight saving all the time, all we'll have done is moved our time zone one zone to the east. So that means that the people who live in California would just be on mountain time.
And mountain time residents would live in central time. And if you live in central time now, if you keep your clock moved ahead for an hour, now you're on eastern time. So it's really just a trick we're performing with the clocks. We don't have any effect whatsoever.
on the sun, or how much daylight we're going to have every day. Now, your book is called The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving. So can I read from the title that you think this is silly? I think it's not only silly, I think it's so confusing that it has for more than 100 years been a source of debate,
argument, confusion, and all sorts of crazy comedy in our Congress. The lawmakers themselves do not know how to talk about this, don't know why we're doing it, and yet every 20 years they give us some more of it. The first time we ever had a national daylight saving law, so the whole country was going to be using their clocks in the same way. We had six months of daylight saving,
for those long summer months when we have more daylight during the day and then we had six months of regular old standard time. I think that was the perfect compromise. Congress got it right once.
Unfortunately, they've changed it three times since and they've just made it more confusing every time they change it. Now, do you understand why Congress is involved? Our governments get involved in this whole thing because our national elected leaders are the ones determining how we set our time zones and when we actually change our clocks back and forth. So if you don't like the way it is now, give it 20 years and it might change.
Thank you so much to Michael Downing for telling us about Daylight Saving Time. I learned a lot of stuff I had never known before.
If you'd like to learn a lot about something you don't know much about and you have a question you think we should tackle on this show, send it to us. Ask an adult to record you on a phone. Tell us your first name, where you live, and how old you are. And tell your adult to email the file to questions at butwhykids.org. We can't answer every question we receive, but we do listen to all of them, and we love hearing your wonderful voices. ♪
But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public Radio. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Until then, stay curious. From PR.