Editor:
Re: All life set is to standard time, March 13, letters.
Letter writer Mr. De Rosa seems to have a solution in search of a problem.
The clock and standard time was created as a way to measure and track the time of day.
It is purely artificial and was only created to approximate the position of the sun in the sky because a sundial was pretty useless at night and cloudy days.
Plants and animals don’t use clocks.
Daylight Saving Time has been used in the U.S. and in many European countries since World War I. … ‘An Act to preserve daylight and provide standard time for the United States’ was enacted on March 19, 1918.
It both established standard time zones and set summer DST to begin on March 31, 1918.
Clocks in the German Empire, and its ally Austria, were turned ahead by one hour on April 30, 1916 – two years into World War I. The rationale was to minimize the use of artificial lighting to save fuel for the war effort.
Time zones were arbitrarily set. Newfoundland is half an hour out.
Deciding to stick with DST in northern climes is purely the convenience of having daylight later into the evening after the workday ends, it does not affect, and has nothing to do with our circadian rhythms.
Tom Cragg, Surrey
