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Hey there, American History Hotliners. Bob Crawford here, Thrilled to be joining you again for another episode of American History Hotline, the show where you ask the questions. And the best way to get us a question is is to record a video or a voice memo on your phone and email it to AmericanHistoryHotlinemail.com that's AmericanHistoryHotlinemail.com okay, today's question is something that's a little divisive. I don't know how divisive it is, but we're about to find out. Here to help me answer the question is Chad Orzell. He's author of the book A Brief History of Timekeeping, the Science of Marking Time From Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks. He's also an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Chad, thanks for joining me today.

Chad Orzell (4:01)

Thanks for having me on.

Bob Crawford (4:02)

All right, Chad, our question comes from Donna in Stockton, California. She wants to know why the heck do we still have Daylight Saving Time and why can't we get rid of it?

Chad Orzell (4:17)

So the question of Daylight Saving Time is really it's a question of priorities, right? There are two things that Daylight Saving Time accomplishes. One is it ensures that the sun rises relatively early in the winter, so it's not sunrise at 9am as it would be in my area if we were on Daylight Saving year round. And it also ensures that the sun is up late in the summer. So you have those nice long summer evenings, you know, where you can go to a baseball game and it's light out until, you know, after nine o'. Clock. And we like both of those things. We like having both of those, and we would lose those if we went we could only keep one of those if we went to a system where we're either daylight saving year round or or standard time year round. So it's kind of the best way to balance those two things that we like having.

Bob Crawford (5:15)

So take us back before this, right before standardized time and time zones, what did people do?

Chad Orzell (5:24)

So the oldest forms of timekeeping all rely on the position of the sun in the sky, right? You say, you know, the sun comes up in the east ish, and it sets in the west ish and moves across the sky over the course of the day, and you can keep track of the time by roughly where it is. If you want to be a little more precise, you can, you know, put a stick in the ground and some markings and make yourself a sundial, and everybody just sort of associated. You know, noon is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. It's due south if you're in the northern hemisphere. And so you can identify that point and call that noon. That varies from place to place as you move around the Earth. So as you move from east to west, the sun will appear either higher in the sky or lower in the sky at the same instant. And so the time of noon is different in different locations. Now, that doesn't matter if the fastest transportation you have is, you know, getting a guy on a horse or. Or a ship sailing on the. On the ocean could be because you're never going to move far enough for it to make a significant difference. But once you start to get things like trains and then, you know, fast boats and airplanes, then it starts to matter a lot.

Bob Crawford (6:43)

And is that when it came into standardization, like at the advent of the. Of the railroad?

Chad Orzell (6:50)

It's the advent of the railroads. And also, the telegraph is a really big thing because that lets you send messages instantaneously over enormous distances. And, you know, suddenly you can be in New York City and, you know, sending a telegram to somebody in San Francisco and getting a response back in minutes or hours, rather than, you know, taking three months to get there and back. So then it really starts to matter that, you know, the sun is much lower in the sky in San Francisco than it is in New York.

Bob Crawford (7:22)

So I'm thinking the 1830s, a little.

Chad Orzell (7:26)

Later than that, 1850s, is. Is when it starts to really become an issue. By the mid-1800s, the railroads are kind of standardizing things on their own, right? Any individual railroad company owns many miles of track. They string telegraph cables along those tracks, and they use them to sync up all of their own clocks. So they're pretty well locked in. It's around in the 1850s, the rail companies sort of start to agree to synchronize their schedules with each other. So they're. They're taking a smallish number of. Of local times, but most municipalities still sort of kept track of. Of their own. You know, noon is when the sun is highest in the sky. And. And then there's railroad time, which is what you need to know if you're going to get on a train here.

Bob Crawford (8:21)

So it really didn't matter at that point if it's 1215 in Charlotte, North Carolina, and 1247 in Philadelphia.

Chad Orzell (8:28)

Right. It did. It didn't make that much difference. You know, it's a. It's a handful of minutes, most places that you would travel over the course of a day or, you know, it's maybe like half an hour if you take a really long ride and arrive in a distant location. So, you know, it's not that big a deal for most people, and people just kind of rolled with it.

Bob Crawford (8:51)

So what about time zones? When did they. When did they come into standardization?

Chad Orzell (8:57)

So this all happens in the 1870s into early 1880s. And it starts with a guy named Cleveland Abbey, who was one of the first weather forecasters. He's at the forerunner of the National Weather Service. And he was trying to coordinate weather observations across a huge area of the country. And also the most dramatic event was an aurora borealis that happened in 1874. And he was trying to link up measurements of many observers in many different locations were recording their observations. He was trying to piece it all together. And he found it was. It was a miserable mess because people had, you know, written down the time according to their local clock, and other people were on railroad time and people were, you know, scattered all over and. And putting it all together was a real mess. So he started to lobby for establishing some sort of standardization of time and pitched the idea of we should just divide the country up into chunks and have them all agree to be the same time.

Bob Crawford (10:05)

Pitched it to.

Chad Orzell (10:07)

He started with a group called the American Metrological Society that didn't actually do very much. They were at Columbia. And so their response was the classic academic response of just creating a committee and making him the chair of it. But he was. He was a civil servant, so he knew how to deal with that. And he responded by reaching out to people who had actual power, which included both the government and the. The railroads. So there was a trade organization that was the general time convention of railroad officials, which coordinated schedules of rail lines all across the country. And he got in touch with. With the guy who ran that and brought the idea to him, a fellow named William Allen. And he had a counterpart in Canada named Sanford Fleming who was thinking along similar lines. And the two of them got with the railroads and said Allen very explicitly pitched it to the railroads as, look, if we don't do something, Congress is going to get involved, and we're not going to like whatever Congress comes up up with. So we should just impose our own system of time zones and then. And then everybody else will go along. And that's in fact what happened. They, they drew up a set of time zones based on where there were boundaries between collections of railroad companies. It turns out to be pretty close to the eastern, central, mountain, western zones that we have now. And they just said, you know, all of the railroad companies agreed to adopt this system and then they lobbied local municipalities to sign on to their time scheme. And that ended up becoming the, the backbone of, of standardized time zones in.

Bob Crawford (11:55)

The U.S. and so the idea that the, the Easter time zone is an hour different from Central and Mountain, is 2 hour different from east, and Pacific is 3 hour different from east, that was just kind of a, you know, it's not to the minute, but it was an estimation.

Chad Orzell (12:14)

Right. And what works out nicely, you know, the width of those zones is approximately one hour in difference in the position of the sun in the sky. So that works out pretty, pretty nicely. And, you know, everybody in the zone had to change their clocks a little bit. So he was really savvy with this plan. See, fixed the, the time based on the observatory in Greenwich, England.

Bob Crawford (12:45)

Right, Greenwich, meantime.

Chad Orzell (12:46)

Yeah. And which hadn't yet been fully established, but he tied it to that because that meant that, that literally every city, every major city had to change their clocks by a few minutes. So nobody, it wasn't like Washington D.C. was being forced to adopt New York City time or, you know, Atlanta was being forced to adopt Boston time. Everybody had to change the clocks by a little bit. And so it was easier to put over on the, on the big cities.

Bob Crawford (13:14)

Chad, do you ever think to yourself that there's no way that we could come up with this again?

Chad Orzell (13:18)

These days it would be hard to get everybody to sign on to these.

Bob Crawford (13:22)

Yeah.

Chad Orzell (13:23)

These days, particularly since you've got, you know, if you look at sort of eastern Maine to western Indiana, that's like, it's like an hour and 10 minutes actual difference if you were going by the position of the sun. And so it's, you know, for those people at those edges of those boundaries, it's not a small difference in the length of your day.

Bob Crawford (13:49)

So Daylight Saving Time, when does that enter the chat?

Chad Orzell (13:55)

Daylight Saving Time comes about, starts in Europe around World War I. And it's basically as the name suggests, it's a way to avoid having to burn energy to generate light. Right. So they don't want to have to burn coal to generate electricity to power lights. So they just make, they shift the clock so it's daylight longer, and then people don't need to turn the lights on and then they can save coal for the war effort. That starts during World War I gets pretty universally adopted by the combatants, including the U.S. when we get into it. And then after the war it kind of gets a little loose for a while. And then in World War II, everybody again does this shift of clocks in the summertime to make it light longer so that you're not using coal and oil that could go to the war effort. And then after World War II, it sticks around much more, you know, observed a little intermittently, but you know, by the 1960s, they, they decide to, you know, we really need to formalize this. In the mid-60s, they pass a uniform time act that defines, okay, we're going to have these time zones, these are the approximate boundaries and sets up some rules for those states on the edges as to, you know, what can you do in terms of coming in, coming out of time zones and that sort of thing.

Bob Crawford (15:25)

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Bob Crawford (18:43)

This is American History Hotline. I'm your host Bob Crawford. Today my guest is Chad Orzell, author of the book A Brief History of the Science of Marking Time. From Stonehenge to atomic clocks, we're talking about springing forward and falling back. Why do we do it and should we keep doing it? Remember, send us your questions about American history. Record them yourself using your voice memo app on your phone and email them to American History hotlinemail.com that's americanhistoryhotlinemail.com now back to the show. Chad, let's talk about Arizona.

Chad Orzell (19:26)

Okay?

Bob Crawford (19:28)

Anytime I travel there and it's daylight saving time, I get messed up. What's up with Arizona?

Chad Orzell (19:35)

So Arizona is one of the last holdouts in not participating in the time switch. And their argument is actually energy based as well. Right? The origin of daylight savings is trying not to spend fuel that could go to two other purposes on generating artificial light. Arizona's argument these days is look, it's really hot here. And so if people are awake, you know, longer during daylight hours, that's more time that it's really hot. And, you know, we have to do air conditioning and, and things like that, or people are just miserable. So, you know, it doesn't save us any energy to, to move the clocks later in the summer. We actually want it to get dark earlier in Arizona so that the temperature goes down and things are more pleasant. The other big one that, that doesn't participate is Hawaii, which, you know, doesn't directly border anything else. And also they're far enough in the tropics that the change in the length of the day isn't that great to begin with. So it doesn't make as much of a difference if they push daylight back and forth. So. So Hawaii for a long time doesn't.

Bob Crawford (20:51)

Is Hawaii in Pacific time zone or that they have a whole different.

Chad Orzell (20:54)

They're their own time zone.

Bob Crawford (20:55)

They have their own time zone.

Chad Orzell (20:56)

Yeah, I think they're, they're five hours off east coast time, so.

Bob Crawford (21:00)

And just to make this a note of this, the Navajo Nation within Arizona does not observe daylight saving time.

Chad Orzell (21:09)

Right. And there's been, you know, for a long time some counties in Indiana that stay with the, that go with the central zone because even though the boundary is supposed to be the state boundary, most of the people there work in Chicago or in, in Springfield. And so they, they, you know, they go with the, the Illinois time because that's where most of the people are, are working.

Bob Crawford (21:34)

I gotta say, I travel a lot and I travel west a lot. And every time we hit central Tennessee, Oak, not Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near there, and you get that extra hour, you really feel like you're, you're beating time, you know, like you're really getting something in your pocket.

Chad Orzell (21:53)

I got, I got myself in, in trouble one time because I was going from Georgia to Alabama to, to give a talk and, you know, spending a leisurely morning. And then I, I realized very belatedly that there was a time change involved. I guess it was the other way around. I started in Alabama and I was going to Georgia, and then I was like, oh, crap. It's like a different time zone. Like I, I have an hour less to get there than I think I do.

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So.

Bob Crawford (22:21)

So we got Hawaii, we've got Arizona, we've got parts of Indiana. Any other states not observed it.

Chad Orzell (22:30)

It changes fairly frequently. I, I don't know what the current status is. I think that's it at the moment.

Bob Crawford (22:38)

Well, if you ask any Politician and they have nothing else to talk about. They're going to tell you they want.

Chad Orzell (22:44)

To get rid of it sometimes if they have other things that they could be talking about and they want to not be talking about them.

Bob Crawford (22:51)

I think you, I think you're actually more accurate on that.

Chad Orzell (22:53)

Yeah, the, the issue there is, you know, everybody says they hate it because it's inconvenient like twice a year, right. So you know, there's those two days where you have to reset all the clocks in, in your house and you know, that's, that's awkward. But as I said at the beginning, it gets us two things that we like we tried. In the early 1970s during the oil crunch, there was a law passed to actually go to year round daylight saving time and took effect in January. And by October when the time to roll the clocks back came around, by then they had, within 10 months they had repealed the law and we moved the clocks back again. And the reason is without, if you stay on the daylight saving time that we use in the summer, then sunrise in a lot of east coast cities in December is like 9 in the morning, right. And so, you know, children waiting for the bus, the sun isn't up yet. And people hate that even more than they hate resetting their clocks. And so we went back to the system of springing forward and falling back. You know, the real disruptive one is the spring where you have to move the clocks forward because everybody loses an hour of sleep there.

Bob Crawford (24:17)

Right.

Chad Orzell (24:17)

And that's kind of, nobody likes that. The fall one people don't mind so much because, you know, there's one weekend a year when you get an extra hour of sleep and that's kind of nice.

Bob Crawford (24:29)

It messes the kids up though.

Chad Orzell (24:31)

If the kids and dogs, the, the dog is outraged. Every November we, we know why is my breakfast an hour late?

Bob Crawford (24:39)

Right. And our kids, it just seems to be. And you, you, you talk to the teachers at school and it is, it's, it's school. It really affects younger children.

Chad Orzell (24:49)

Yeah. My joke solution to this problem is that we should, we should keep the fallback one. We should keep that one weekend a year where everybody gets an extra hour of sleep, but we should get rid of the spring forward and instead starting at the winter solstice, December 21, give or take, every weekend, move forward five minutes for 12 weeks. And that gets you back to an hour forward in the middle of March. Right. And that, you know, five minutes a weekend, nobody would notice that. And you know, the clock in my car is off by five minutes already. So it'd be fine. It wouldn't, Wouldn't disrupt anything. And then you would. You would smooth out that. That spring forward bit and still have the nice, you know, Oh, I get some extra sleep tonight.

Bob Crawford (25:41)

Well, Chad, most clocks these days do it themselves, right?

Chad Orzell (25:46)

You're taking your time off. You know, if I really care what time it is, I look at my smartphone, which has the time automatically updated from, from the Internet. Now, every time I pitch that idea, everybody who works with computers, who hears it just throws things at me because they don't want to. They know what would be involved in dealing with that.

Bob Crawford (26:06)

Well, so, Chad, there is this perception that because I remember before the last, most recent election, it was Senator Marco Rubio who was really on the charge. It was a bipartisan effort, but two, to get rid of Daylight Saving Time. Cause people believe it's an outdated concept, but from what you're telling me, it's not an outdated concept. It's still applicable to our lives, even in 2025.

Chad Orzell (26:36)

Yeah. As I said, it's a question of priorities and what are you looking for? And I think the important thing to keep in mind is the whole system is pretty arbitrary, Right. Our system of time zones relies on us pretending that it is the precise same time of day in eastern Maine and western Indiana. And that's, you know, that makes no actual geographical or astronomical sense, but we do it because it's convenient. It means that, you know, except for a handful of border regions, right. You're not going to drive anywhere and have the time of day change in a way that's going to be irritating. It's really easy to coordinate activities over the kind of span that you can drive in a car in a day. And that works out pretty nicely and makes everybody's lives a lot easier. If we're already disrupting the natural order of people in eastern Maine and western Indiana enough to. To, you know, arbitrarily assign them the same time, it's not that much more of a disruption to have to change the clocks every now and then. And then you get those nice long summer evenings, and then it's not pitch dark when you arrive at work in December mornings, and everybody's probably happier for it.

Bob Crawford (28:03)

Looking at this from a historical perspective, Daylight Saving time time zones, they are part of the rise of capitalism, Right? They were, you know, it was business who created these, right? American businesses, American industry created this.

Chad Orzell (28:24)

Yeah, I said it's the quintessential. It's adopted through the quintessential American process. Of having large corporations lobby for it and get the system adopted that way.

Bob Crawford (28:35)

Was there anything at the state, around the same time happening in Europe? Were they asking for this? You know, because is, is this an American innovation that spread worldwide?

Chad Orzell (28:50)

Now the, the Europeans were thinking along similar lines. And there's actually a major conference in the mid-1880s that's, that's held in Washington D.C. where they bring together representatives of, of all the, the major world powers and talk about we should standardize times so fully. Most European countries had already within their own borders set up standard time. They just made a time zone that is their own country. And then, you know, there was some coordination among nations that, that shared borders and, and so on. So there was this move to standardize everything in the, the 1880s. The big sticking point ended up being where do you put the zero? Where do you, where do you call. What do you call zero longitude? Where you know, and then everybody references their clocks to that. And the two big contenders were Greenwich, England and Paris, France. And Paris had sort of the claim of having an older, more prestigious observatory that had been in the business longer. The British counter argument was that like 75% of world shipping used maps that were made in, in the the UK and it. That ended up carrying the day the US had because of William Allen already synced their clocks to something that was based on the time in Greenwich. And so we were, we were fine with it and so went along. And so the French got outvoted because most people were using British nautical maps anyway and it was just easier to, to go with that and use the time based on Greenwich.

Bob Crawford (30:35)

Well, Chad, where can people find your work?

Chad Orzell (30:39)

I have a substack under my own name on a lot of things. The books are available wherever books are sold.

Bob Crawford (30:48)

I've been speaking with Chad Orzell. He's author of the book A Brief History of the Science of Marking Time From Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks. He's also an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Chad, thank you so much. It's been great.

Chad Orzell (31:09)

Thanks for having me on.

Bob Crawford (31:10)

Thank you. You've been listening to American History Hotline, a production of Iheart podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show's executive producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers from Iheart are Jordan Runtal and Jason English. Original music composed by me, Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our email is americanhistoryhotlinemail.com if you like the show, please tell your friends and leave us A review in Apple Podcasts I'm your host Bob Crawford. Feel free to hit me up on social media to ask a history question or to let me know what you think of the show. You can find me. Obcraword Bass thanks so much for listening. See you next week.

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