23 June 2017

Daylight Savings Time -- Time Hasn't Always Been The Way We Think!:


Daylight Savings Time … an interesting history

Has your community every "tried" something and then tried to "turn the clock back?" Raleigh NC tried Daylight Savings Time (DST) back when most of the country (and also the rest of NC) weren't yet enamored with this rite of spring and fall. Read about this 1932 experiment. They weren’t the only community or state to play with this idea.

It really wasn't until 1966 and the Uniform Time Act that some order was brought to the situation.  Can you imagine having non-regulated non-uniform rules for DST?

It’s strange to realize that this all came about during my lifetime (though as a child – who cared about time?) and that many of our ancestors witnessed the introduction of something that we take for granted.

It wasn’t until 2007 that the dust seems to have settled on DST as we know it.  Read more here

In the contiguous US, only Arizona currently exercises that right [to opt out of DST]. Clocks in most of the state, including its capital, Phoenix, remain on Mountain Standard Time (MST) all year. The only exception is the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona, which follows DST to stay in sync with the parts of its territory extending into Utah and New Mexico—both states observe DST.

Other parts of the USA that do not follow DST are Hawaii and all of the country's external territories, such as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands.

In 2006, the state of Indiana, after having abstained from changing its clocks since 1970, decided to join the national DST regime.

I just never really thought about the concept of time.

Along those lines, did you know that we didn’t have a time zone system until the late 19th century when railroads drove that need.  Can you imagine that as railroads were introduced and expanded that there were more than 300 local times?!?!?!  Read more here.

I think of our world as mostly operating to common standards and just hadn’t thought that such wasn’t the case for our ancestors!



How did your ancestors react to DST?  Did they live in a community that played with its adoption pre-1966?

Are there other country-wide changes, that we take for granted, in “something” that also impacted our ancestors, and maybe ourselves, like DST or the introduction of time zones?









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