Save the day

EARLIER this month the United States shifted their clocks forward one hour to ‘daylight savings time’. Most of Europe will do the same at the end of March. Before Christmas they will move the clocks back one hour. I took a look at this practice and fell into a rabbit hole. Today I cover part one of what I found.

Daylight savings was first seriously proposed by a New Zealander in the 1890s, who argued that moving the clock forward in summer for ‘summer time’ allowed for more sun shining time after the workday ended, and this could be used for sports and outdoor activities.

Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were the first to implement daylight savings in April 1916.

The reasoning was wartime efficiency: an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day meant less coal would be used and therefore more would be available for the war effort. Not to be left behind, Britain followed barely three weeks later.

The jury is still out on whether it saves energy, with some evidence that it decreases electricity use, but increases motor fuel consumption.

Since the First World War, daylight savings has been used on and off around the world with no real regularity.

REASONING

Even South Africa used it over the two summer seasons of 1942-43, again with the reasoning of wartime energy savings, but never since.

Curiously, Namibia practiced a sort of daylight savings from 1993 until 2017. Except, they did it the other way round, implementing ‘winter time’ to have more light in the morning. Their reasoning revolved around school children walking to school in the dark. Think of the children!

Namibia is one of very few places to ever use winter time.

Czechoslovakia tried it once in 1946, using an argument about spreading energy demands, but they never been tried again.

Interestingly, Ireland uses winter time. Most of the state is geographically located an hour behind Greenwich Mean Time (London time). Their winter time system puts them on the same time as the rest of the UK.

One would think there are fairly obvious economic reasons for being in the same time zone as the countries you are doing business with.

MYSTERY

So it’s mystery that the Namibian winter time lasted as long as it did since it puts the country out of sync with its major regional trading partners, especially South Africa, which accounts for 60 per cent of their imports and to whose currency the Namibian Dollar is pegged.

Some said Namibia’s clock switching caused a loss of about four hours of productivity a day- they lost one hour in the morning when one country started earlier, two hours with unsynchronised lunchtimes

and an hour in the late afternoon after one country knocked off.

Small wonder 97 per cent in a government survey said they preferred just stay on SA time always.

To throw a spanner in the works, putting Namibia into winter time actually aligns the country with the true solar time there. Like Cape Town, the place is so far to the west of the time zone that they have been slotted into, that actually, they technically fall into the next time zone in a geographic sense.

They just don’t in an economic and political sense.

In Southern Africa, to be truly on the correct solar time, you have to be on the 30th meridian east. Ermelo and Pietermaritzburg come closest to having true time. Mbabane is on the 31st meridian east, so although we are close to true time, at points in the year we are offset by as much as 22 minutes, like in November when true noon happens that much earlier than solar noon.

I could go on, but for now I have run out of space and time.