A brief history of time

If you're reading this, it may already be too late.

Get back in bed, pull the covers over your head and by no means leave the house -- for at least a week. With all the sleep-deprived drivers, it's dangerous out there.

As you are undoubtedly already aware, at 1:59 this morning, time took an hour's leap forward in most parts of the United States. That's the danger zone.

A study conducted at the University of British Columbia several years ago discovered that there is an 8 percent increase in the number of traffic accidents in the week following the annual "spring forward."

Reporting on the findings in a letter published by the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers speculated the crash crunch is caused by sleep-deprived drivers doing stupid things. According to the theory, few folks these days really get as much sleep as they need. Before electric lights were invented, people averaged 91/2 hours of sleep a night. Now the national average is closer to seven. That means most of us are walking (and driving) around all the time in a semi-sleep-deprived state. The loss of that extra hour's sack time leads to groggy minds and even "micro-sleeps," periods of up to a minute when the brain shuts off entirely. That obviously has serious consequences if you happen to be making a left turn into traffic at the time.

Other observers attribute the spring spike in accidents to the sudden change in the amount of light during driving times. Or maybe it's just the strain of having to reprogram all the electronic clocks that have taken over our domestic lives.

Fortunately, the accident rate will normalize later in the week, as people adjust to their new sleep patterns, and actually fall at the end of October when the clocks are set back.

Regardless of the reason or the season, however, there's no denying that changing our clocks can have a significant human cost. Unfortunately, while the rising and setting of the sun may be beyond the power of parliaments and potentates, that's not true with the keeping of the calendar or the clock.

For most of human history, time-keeping was a local matter, but after accurate, mechanical timepieces were developed, the Earth was divided into 24 time zones, each 15 degrees of longitude and one hour ahead of its western neighbor. In the United States, the clocks were first calibrated in 1883, when railroads found it necessary to standardize their schedules across the country. The International Prime Meridian Conference held in Washington a year later formalized the cause, and Congress made the four-time zone system a federal law in 1918.

The notion of adjusting clocks in spring and fall to make the most of the daylight isn't a new one. In 1784, while a minister to France, noted time-saver Ben Franklin wrote a humorous essay "Turkey vs. Eagle, McCauley is my Beagle," which advocated rising an hour earlier in summer to make one's day more productive.

The idea was ignored for more than a century until 1907, when William Willett, an English writer, wanted to move the clock ahead by 80 minutes in four 20-minute shifts during April, May, June and July.

Modern daylight-saving time began with fuel conservation efforts in World War I. Germany switched in 1915, Britain the next year and the United States two years after that, although Americans protested so much that the law was dropped seven months later.

New efforts to turn back the clock came with the Second World War. Congress reinstated daylight-saving time on Feb. 2, 1942, moving the clock ahead one hour and keeping it there until Sept. 30, 1945, when time was moved back to normal.

It wasn't until 1966 that Congress passed the Uniform Time Act. Though states weren't obligated to observe daylight-saving time, those that did had to start the last Sunday in April and end the last Sunday in October. In 1974, Congress adjusted daylight-saving time to 10 months and in 1975, to eight months. Officials calculated that the country saved 10,000 barrels of oil for each day of the change. Then in 1986, President Reagan signed Public Law 99-359, moving the starting date to the first Sunday in April.

Now daylight-saving time is observed across the United States and its territories, except in Hawaii, Arizona, several counties of southeast Indiana, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands and Guam.

Daylight-saving can get confusing when you leave the country. Clocks in Mexico and Canada are re-set on the U.S. schedule, except for parts of Quebec, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, which maintain standard time.

Countries of the European Union observe a common daylight-saving time from the last Sunday in March to the fourth Sunday of September, except for the French, who've always insisted that cows can't change their habits. Few Asian countries save daylight, but many southern hemisphere nations do, albeit from October to March.

Now, not everyone is in love with this semi-annual temporal shift. Some folks don't appreciate having their sleep and schedules disrupted twice a year. For everyone who appreciates the extra hour of sleep in the morning, others find themselves in the dark as they come home from work or after school events, have difficulty staying awake in the evening or discover themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time because they forgot to reset clocks.

An organization called Standardtime.com is putting forth a modest proposal that, according to its logic, would end the problem once and for all. Observing that Eastern Standard Time is the same as Central Daylight Time and Mountain Standard Time is the same as Pacific Daylight Time, they propose eliminating two of the time zones and instituting a permanent two-hour difference between the remaining two. This would be accomplished by keeping Eastern and Mountain time on their standard settings and keeping Pacific and Central time zones on permanent daylight-saving time.

Whether or not this would eliminate the need to change clocks, it would greatly simplify the lives of TV programmers. In this day of re-aligning the divisions of pro football and baseball teams, why should we be hesitant to tinker with time?

While the time zones have been around for more than 150 years, local changes have always been tolerated. China, for example, has declared itself to be one time zone, even though geographically it actually spreads across five. And several years ago, Mexico eliminated one of its three time zones. If you'd like to vote for this time shift, visit the Web site: http://www.standardtime.com/.

Here's a final saving-time tip for travelers: Always ask your airline or travel agent about daylight-saving when you make overseas plans in April and October. Flight departure times in this country may be moved up an hour to avoid discrepancies. Jetlag notwithstanding, it's never fun to arrive at your destination an hour out of sync. To be sure, there's a good Web site, http://www.worldtime.com. Or you can wait until you get where you're going and ask.

Oh, and it might also be wise to hit the snooze button when your alarm goes off tomorrow morning.

Tell the boss, better late than sorry.