Introduction
It really wasn’t all that long ago that keeping track of the time was not as passive as it is today. Back in the 1980’s, a mere 40 years ago, cell phones weren’t prevalent. Even desktop and laptop computers were still prone to needing to have their time checked.
This was especially true when the Daylight Savings Time changes happened twice a year. And this is the story of how I, despite having recently undertaken a time-based hobby, nearly missed this event.
The Importance of Daylight Savings Time
Given how technology has made the shift between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time so automatic and seemless to most of our lives, we have lost the significance of this event. However, it really is still a very specific event that has some fairly major implications.
The easily understood part of Daylight Saving Time (DST) is that it is based on the fact that the earth rotates on a tilted axis, and as we orbit the sun the length of daylight shifts throughout the year. Therefore, we adjust our clocks when there are fewer daylight hours during a day in order to take advantage of that daylight.
But there is quite a bit more to the changing of the clocks than meets the eye. The Romans used a system of changing hour lengths with their water clocks to account for the changing of daylight periods throughout the year. The National Assembly in Spain moved meetings an hour forward from May-September in order to account for the changes in daylight.
However, it wasn’t until 1895 when entomologist George Hudson submitted a paper proposing the changing of the clocks to the Wellingont Philosophical Society of New Zealand that anyone considered the idea. Hudson had come up with the idea in order to have more post-work daylight available to him for collecting insects. In 1907 William Willet independently proposed the same idea, and would publish a paper with the concept a few years later.
Port Arthur, Ontario, Canada was the first city to actually implement DST in 1908, followed by Orillia, Ontario in 1911. The German Empire and Austria-Hungary were the first states to implement the time change in 1916.
The importance of time keeping, however, had not fully been realized yet. It would become a major thing that was necessary, however, with the invention of the railroad, and the need to time trains accurately. Standard Time / Daylight Saving time also played a part in World War I.
There’s a lot more detail regarding the history of Daylight Saving Time, which a brief read on Wikipedia can fill in.
My Time Story
Throughout the years, I have been embracing my role as a “technology curmudgeon”. That is to say, that I don’t have an appreciation of the advancement of technology for the sake of the advancement of technology. However, that doesn’t mean that I am totally against the advancement of technology, just that I want to see a proof of the value of the advancement before integrating it into my life.
For example, the furor over NFT’s a few years ago. There was no way in which I saw them as having any value, or fitting into or improving most lives in any substantive ways. The same goes for Crypto Currency. At one time I was actually more interested in Crypto, as I saw some projects that had portential to add value. In particular Namecoin, which initially proposed to be a censorship-proof method of handling the Domain Name System, which is extremely important to the internet as we know. However, this project has failed to gain recognition by ICANN the controlling entity for domain names, and therefore has only been able to handle .bit domains outside of the ICANN registry.
Even cell phones were initially a hard sell for me. I didn’t see the use for them initially. That was until there was real development in the Smartphone market, and it started replacing numerous forms of communication, including text messaging, beepers and regular telephones. By the time the iPhone was announced it was clear that cellphone technology was here to stay, and I adopted it.
However, that doesn’t mean that I have adopted everything related to cellphones that have happened over the years. Google Glass? Nah, I didn’t see where people really wanted or needed Augmented Reality. Then there were the fitness trackers / watches that begat the Apple Watch.
This was a whole area that I didn’t go for. Why? The issues surrounding technology, applications, and the amount of information that you are giving up when using them has become a convuluted mess. And something that I generally don’t want to deal with.
But, after doing some investigation into smart watches, I did decide that I wanted to wear a watch again — which I hadn’t done for years and years.
How I Realized I Had Forgotten About DST
So, over the past eight or nine months, I’ve amased a bit of a wrist watch collection. Unlike most people that get into watches, however, I haven’t been interested in the mechanical variety of watches. Instead I have a preference for several forms of quartz watches.
Now, I briefly talked about quartz watches in my article on the Pebble watch. (The Resurrection of the Pebble) Some of the things that I have pointed out abot the advancement of quartz technology include solar charged watches, and radio controlled watches.
And, I have a few examples of both solar and radio controlled watches in my collection. In fact, the Casio Lineage watches in my collection are both solar and radio controlled. They have become some of my more frequently worn watches. They are truly “grab-n-go” watches.
However, I bought them after the last time change, so I set them up and haven’t had a time where they should have adjusted automatically… That is until this last Sunday, when without even realizing that the time change ocurred, I picked up one of them out of my collection and put it on.
The fun of the whole situation was that I didn’t realize there was anything significant. The time on the watch matched my cellphone, my computer, and my eReader…all of which I use before getting my breakfast in the morning (I load a bunch of fresh periodicals on my eReader to take to breakfast with me every morning).
Now, the unusual thing in my house this: there is a digital clock that my parents bought in the early 2000’s that isn’t connected to the internet, or even the home WiFi in any way. The clock is rather a nuisance, really, but I leave it sitting near the TV in my living room out of the familiarity of it being there for so many years.
So, I was sitting in my living room this last Sunday, reading The Economist on my eReader, when I glanced at the clock and realized that it had the same time as my eReader. But, it shouldn’t have — during the winter there was always a one hour difference between that clock and any of my other devices.
Confused, I looked at my watch, and found that it had the same time as my eReader and the clock sitting next to the television. It was then that two things dawned on me: (1) the time had changed, and (2) the Lineage watch I had picked up had, indeed, used the military radio signal to reset itself when the time had officially changed…without any intervention from me.
Now I just had to deal with the 40+ non-radio controlled watches in my collection.
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