Timing Is Everything

[whojamfan]

I believe that it originally had something to do with the farmers squeezing out a little more time for harvesting, or something like that. I like gaining an hour, but hate losing one.

[cjj]

I believe that it originally had something to do with the farmers squeezing out a little more time for harvesting, or something like that. I like gaining an hour, but hate losing one.

Ah, there's the old farmer rumor. I've never been able to figure out why in the world farmers would want to do anything with the clock setting. As a guy who farms 500 acres, I'll tell you, things aren't done by the clock, they're done by available daylight. Well, these days, we extend the daylight by having all sorts of lights on our equipment. Changing the clock won't make more hours of daylight. Basically, you start when it gets light and finish when it gets dark, never really caring what the clock says. It's not like there's a time clock you have to punch.

Taking care of livestock is pretty much the same, they don't care what the clock says either.

It's really only people who live by the clock, i.e., factory/office work. From what I can tell, the original intent was to get more daylight hours in the summer after "working hours" so people could have time to do activities which required daylight. I guess that's a reasonable thing to do, but shifting the working hours would accomplish the same thing. But, I suppose it would be more difficult for the industrial bureaucracy to accept people starting and ending shifts at different times (funny that governmental bureaucracies have accepted shifting the clocks instead).

Anyway, here's a reasonably good writeup on the whole subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time