“Times, they are a’changin’” is an expression that reflects what happened last weekend. The time change consumes precious minutes of weather forecasts and provides palaver for pundits. Employers brace for the rash of wake-up calls that follow. And it’s all about time.
Last weekend was the great time change. Twice a year in most of the United States, clocks are moved forward or back to take advantage of sunshine hours. Time tells much as it moves along, forming a web to link together disparate places and equipment that are important in our lives.
Our caveman ancestors had it simple. If you couldn’t see, then the best thing to do was go to sleep. The ability to make fire and therefore illuminate the dark meant that man could alter time. If a stick of wood showed flames for an hour and one had five sticks of wood then the light was extended for five hours.
Early accountants began to catalog things like candles, oil drums and wicks; they became ways to measure time.
As with so many things in the world around, there are small things that a single, bored mind begins to ponder.
Questions such as “ How long is the dark?” and “Where does the sun come up on the other side of the world?” began to be studied. How could the day be divided and how could those divisions be tracked? This became a major sport and remains so to this day. Tools for measuring the day — clocks — were made.
And time keeps ticking on.
Benjamin Franklin is given some credit for pushing the idea of adjusting the clocks to claim as much daylight as possible. Understanding that time reflected the amount of sunlight available for productive activity was his muse. Government got involved, and finally we are where we are today, with two days a year in which the time on the clock is changed.
There are numerous clocks that are tracked for different reasons. There is a clock for biological time. There is a clock for geographical time. There is a clock for measuring the time. In short there are lots of clocks. Anyone see that rooster?
WIth all this confusion and blather about time, there are still amusing moments to be found. One appears each night on the local news. To help viewers track the hours of daylight, the amount of time that the daylight exists is measured. How long is the day? Watch the local news and find out. This figure is based on solar time. Twice a year the earth shifts its position to the sun and either the days get longer or shorter. It’s a gain or loss for sunlight. This solar time goes back to the time of the dinosaurs. Simple to understand: either you are getting more sunlight (a gain) or you are getting less sunlight (a loss).
But on the almanac page, it is just listed as an amount of time following the linked terms gain/loss. Which is the correct statement? Who knows? Fall back and guess.
Orpheus Allison is a photojournalist living in The County who graduated from UMPI and earned a master of liberal arts degree from the University of North Carolina. He began his journalism career at WAGM television later working in many different areas of the US. After 20 years of television he changed careers and taught in China and Korea.
