J.C. Mattingly - Daylight savings

When my son turned four, he became a random question generator. “Dad, why is a shadow longer or shorter than what makes it?” Or, “Dad, what holds that heavy apple to the limb?” When my son heard us talking about “gaining an hour” when we went off daylight savings time in the fall, he had to ask, “Hey Dad, how much daylight do we save?” I recalled when Nixon instituted Daylight Savings Time in January of 1974 — as an emergency addition to the Energy Conservation Act of 1973 — a cartoon appeared in our local paper. The first frame of the cartoon showed Nixon dangling a piece of rope in front of an audience, declaring it to be 24-inches long. In the next frame, Nixon took a pair of scissors and ceremoniously snipped an inch off the bottom of the rope. The final frame showed Nixon adding the removed 1-inch section to the top of the rope, declaring, “The rope is now 25-inches long.” Recognizing this cartoon would probably be more confusing than helpful in answering my son's question, I explained to him that, in the Old Days before electricity and railroads, timekeeping was basically “sun up to sun down,” because people didn't need timetables for the simple commerce and travel practices of the day...more