Summer+Time

Before you read the following may I explain it has nothing to do with computers, but is the full article which I wrote following the Financial Times publishing a résumé in the 70's.

The reason for my posting here is to hopefully amuse you and at the same time fill you with abhorrence of the people who use their power which is acquired from the populace for their own ends.

If you find it tedious I apologize for my weird sense of humour which is mostly born out of frustration.

Summer Time by :- ***************(Mr.) 2002 There was in 1906 an Entrepreneur/ Industrialist/Builder/ Member of Parliament named :- William Willet (1857-1915). Who after a heavy drinking session in his London Club, where he had dozed off in a chair, and awoke early in the morning he decided to head from his own bed at home. On leaving because it was summer the sun was shining, and passing his workers houses (Hovels) through Petts Wood, near Croydon. He was aghast to observe the blinds drawn, and his workers still in bed. This horrified him to think that they were wasting sunlight, and the cost incurred because they would still be at work when it was dark so causing him to have to provide Gas Light for them to see with. He hastily drew up a recommendation for parliament to move the clocks forward with a number of alternatives, one being moved forward by 2 hours from April to September, another complex scheme of adding eighty minutes, in four separate movements. In order to appear philanthropic on the records. He did not put forward his real reason but presented a pamphlet as follows :- "The Waste of Daylight"” "Everyone appreciates the long, light evenings. Everyone laments their shortage as Autumn approaches; and everyone has given utterance to regret that the clear, bright light of an early morning during Spring and Summer months is so seldom seen or used". Early British laws About twelve months after Willett began to advocate daylight saving (he spent a fortune lobbying). He attracted the attention of the authorities, and a Mr. Pearce, later to become Sir Robert Pearce who introduced a Bill in the House of Commons to make it compulsory to adjust the clocks. The bill was drafted in 1909, and presented to Parliament several times, but it met with ridicule and opposition, especially from farming interests. Generally lampooned at the time, Willett died on March 4, 1915. It was argued by the advocates that there was a small public health benefit to Daylight Saving time. One being almost certainly because of improved visibility it substantially decreases the likelihood of pedestrians being killed on the roads, by horses or horseless carriages. Even if it was beneficial overall, Daylight Saving Time shifts this danger from the morning. to the evening There was a fair bit of opposition from the general public who in the whole were completely ignored, ( After all they were only the working classes, and what did they know about the price of fish ??? ) The agricultural interests complained that the chickens would never get used to it and it would effect their laying capacity, and that certainly the milk would be sour from to early a milking Lord Balfour came forward with a unique concern, depicting the attitude of the gentry If on the night the clocks would be are set back. Supposing some unfortunate lady who was confined with twins, and one child was born 10 minutes before 1 'clock. ... The time of birth of the two children would be reversed. ... Such an alteration might conceivably affect the property and titles in that House.

Page No.2 Willett had suggested a complex scheme of adding eighty minutes, in four separate movements. On May 17, 1916, an Act was passed and scheme was put in operation on the following Sunday, May 21, 1916, following the lead of Germany. There was a storm of opposition, confusion and prejudice. The Royal Meteorological Society insisted that Greenwich time would still be used to measure tides. The parks belonging to the Office of Works and the London County Council decided to close at dusk, which meant that they would be open an extra hour in the evening. Kew Gardens, and consequently ignored the daylight saving scheme and decided to open and close by the unaltered clock. In Edinburgh, the confusion was even more marked, for the gun at the Castle was fired at 1 p.m. summer time. While the ball on the top of the Nelson monument on Carlton Hill fell at 1 o'clock Greenwich time. That arrangement was carried on for the benefit of seamen who could see it from the Firth of Forth. The time fixed for changing clocks was 2 a.m. on a Sunday. After the War, several Acts of Parliament were passed relating to summertime. Eventually, in 1925, it was enacted that summer time should begin on the day following the third Saturday in April. The date for closing of summer time was fixed for the first Saturday in October. The energy saving benefits of this was recognized during World War II, when clocks were put two hours ahead of GMT during the Summer. This became known as Double Summer Time. During the war, clocks remained one hour ahead of GMT throughout the winter.

Opposition since implementation of the Act to Daylight Saving A frequent complaint is the inconvenience of changing many clocks, and adjusting to a new sleep schedule. For most people, this is a mere nuisance, but some people with sleep disorders find this transition very difficult. A writer in 1947 wrote, "I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them more wealthy, by making them(The workers) more efficient, healthy and wise in spite of themselves." (Robertson Davies, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, 1947, XIX, Sunday.) In an effort to compromise and have half Daylight Saving Time year-round some countries set their clocks to fractional time zones, for example:- Kathmandu, Nepal is 5:45 hours ahead of Universal Time; and Calcutta, India is 5:30 ahead. This is because their country straddles international time zones. While I like many others believe that Summer Time should be done away with we have to admire how, politicians have managed to fiddle with such a simple matter (simple legally, not technically) as how to define the time of day It has turned out to be fascinating, display of how governments can make such a mess of a simple matter, with over seventy relevant pieces of legislation in a little over a century, in Britain alone, along with the oddities and irregularities of the incomplete preservation of the official record of published twentieth century secondary legislation. ( There are a Number of Statutes missing )

Page No. 3 List of countries Most countries that observe daylight saving time are listed in the table below. They all save one hour in the summer and change their clocks some time between midnight and 3 am. ________________________________________ Continent Country Beginning and ending days Africa Egypt Start: Last Friday in April End: Last Thursday in September Namibia Start: First Sunday in September End: First Sunday in April Asia Most states of the former USSR Start: Last Sunday in March End: Last Sunday in October Iraq Start: April 1 End: October 1 Israel (Estimate, Israel decides the dates every year) Start: First Friday in April End: First Friday in September Lebanon, Kirgizstan Start: Last Sunday in March End: Last Sunday in October Mongolia Start: Last Sunday in March End: Last Sunday in September Palestine (Estimate) Start: First Friday on or after 15 April End: First Friday on or after 15 October Syria Start: April 1 End: October 1 Iran Start: the first day of Farvardin End: the first day of Mehr Australasia Australia - South Australia, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Lord Howe Island Start: Last Sunday in October End: Last Sunday in March Australia - Tasmania Start: First Sunday in October End: Last Sunday in March Fiji Start: First Sunday in November End: Last Sunday in February New Zealand, Chatham - (read law) Start: First Sunday in October End: Third Sunday in March Tonga Start: First Saturday in October End: First Saturday on or after 15 April Europe European Union - (read law) UK - (read law) Russia Start: Last Sunday in March at 1 am. End: Last Sunday in October at 1 am North America United States, Canada, Mexico St. Johns, Bahamas, Turks and Caicos Start: First Sunday in April End: Last Sunday in October Cuba Start: April 1 End: Last Sunday in October Greenland Same as EU

South America Brazil Start: First Sunday in October End: Last Sunday in February Chile - (read law) Start: Second Saturday of October - at midnight End: Second Saturday of March - at midnight Falklands Start: First Sunday on or after 8 September End: First Sunday on or after 6 April Paraguay Start: First Sunday in October End: Last Saturday in February Antarctica Antarctica (varies, see below) ________________________________________

Page No. 4 Note that there are many oddities. For example, some parts of the US and Canada do not observe Daylight Saving Time, such as the state of Arizona (US) and the province Saskatchewan (Canada). Observance can also be erratic. For example:- Chile delayed its changeover date for the Pope's visit in 1987, and a presidential inauguration in 1990.

Even to this day there has to be an Order made every year as per the example below :-

2002 No. 262

SUMMER TIME

The Summer Time Order 2002

Made 12th February 2002 Laid before Parliament 18th February 2002 Coming into force 11th March 2002

At the Court, at Buckingham Palace, the 12th day of February 2002

Present,

The Queen's Most Excellent Majesty in Council

Her Majesty, in exercise of the powers conferred on Her by section 2(2) of the European Communities Act 1972[1] and all other powers enabling Her in that behalf, is pleased, by and with the advice of Her Privy Council, to order, and it is hereby ordered, as follows:

Citation, commencement and extent 1. - (1) This Order may be cited as the Summer Time Order 2002 and shall come into force on 11th March 2002.

(2) This Order shall have effect in Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Amendments to the Summer Time Act 1972 2. - (1) The Summer Time Act 1972[2] shall be amended as follows.

(2) In section 1 (advance of time during period of summer time) - (a) omit "Subject to section 2 below," in subsection (1), and

(b) for subsection (2) substitute the following - " (2) The period of summer time for the purposes of this Act is the period beginning at one o'clock, Greenwich mean time, in the morning of the last Sunday in March and ending at one o'clock, Greenwich mean time, in the morning of the last Sunday in October." (3) Omit section 2 (extension of period, and double summer time).

(4) In section 3 (interpretation of references), omit "or under" in subsection (1).

A. K. Galloway, Clerk of the Privy Council________________________________________ Page No. 5 Time measurement For a millennia, people have measured time based on the position of the sun - it was noon when the sun was highest in the sky. Sundials were used well into the Middle Ages, when mechanical clocks began to appear. Cities would set their town clock by measuring the position of the sun, but every city would be on a slightly different time. The time indicated by the apparent sun on a sundial is called Apparent Solar Time, or true local time. The time shown by the fictitious sun is called Mean Solar Time, or local mean time when measured in terms of any longitudinal meridian.

First there was Standard Time which began in Britain

Britain was the first country to set the time throughout a region to one standard time. The railways cared most about the inconsistencies of local mean time, it had an adverse effect upon the so called efficiency of the railways. They were in some cases arriving at a local time which was before they had left at London Time, and similarly they were an inordinately long time on other journeys. They forced a uniform time on the country. The original idea was credited to Dr. William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828) and was popularized by Abraham Follett Osler (1808-1903). The first railway to adopt London time was the Great Western Railway in November 1840. Other railways followed suit, and by 1847 most (though not all) railways used London time. On September 22, 1847 the Railway Clearing House, an industry standards body, recommended that GMT be adopted at all stations as soon as the General Post Office permitted it. The transition occurred on 12-01 for the L&NW, the Caledonian, and presumably other railways; the January 1848 Bradshaw's lists many railways as using GMT. By 1855 the vast majority of public clocks in Britain were set to GMT (though some, like the great clock on Tom Tower at Christ Church, Oxford, were fitted with two minute hands, one for local time and one for GMT). The last major holdout was the legal system, which stubbornly stuck to local time for many years, leading to oddities like polls opening at 08:13 and closing at 16:13. The legal system finally switched to GMT when the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act took effect; it received the Royal Assent on August, 2, 1880. In the 1840s a railway standard time for all of England, Scotland, and Wales evolved, replacing several "local time" systems. The Royal Observatory in Greenwich began transmitting time telegraphically in 1852 and by 1855 most of Britain used Greenwich time. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) subsequently evolved as an important and well-recognized time reference for the world.

Page No. 6 The World's Time Zones In the latter part of the nineteenth century, a variety of meridians were used for longitudinal reference by various countries. For a number of reasons, the Greenwich meridian was the most popular of these. At least one factor in this popularity was the reputation for reliability and correctness of the Greenwich Observatory's publications of navigational data. It became clear that shipping would benefit substantially from the establishment of a single "prime" meridian, and the subject was finally resolved in 1884 at a conference held in Washington, where the meridian passing through Greenwich was adopted as the initial or prime meridian for longitude and timekeeping. Given a 24 hour day and 360 degrees of longitude around the earth, it is obvious that the world's 24 time zones have to be 15 degrees wide, on average. The individual zone boundaries are not straight, however, because they have been adjusted for the convenience and desires of local populations. It took some 34 years following the agreement reached at the International Conference, before the standard timekeeping system related to this arrangement of time zones was made official in the United States by an Act of Congress in March 1918,. In an earlier decision prompted by their own interests and by pressures for a standard timekeeping system from the scientific community — meteorologists, geophysicists and astronomers — the U.S. railroad industry anticipated the international accord when they implemented a "Standard Railway Time System" on November 18, 1883. This Standard Railway Time, adopted by most cities, was the subject of much local controversy for nearly a decade following its inception.

Now Atomic time The measurement of time is currently determined by an international consortium based in France which averages the time from approximately 220 atomic clocks in over two dozen countries. The atomic clock is the only object that both tells time and generates a precise time scale. Historically, the calculation of time has been based on the position of the earth relative to the sun using noon, when the sun is highest in the sky, as a marker. The length of the second, which corresponds to the length of time required for 9,192,631,770 cycles of the Caesium atom at zero magnetic field, was determined near the end of the 19th century; this second is thus equivalent to the second defined by the fraction 1/31 556 925.97 47 of the year 1900. In 1967, the official second was set as equal to an average second of Earth's rotation time; the calculation of the average is necessary due to the fact that the earth rotates at a slightly irregular rate. Today, time is determined by counting official seconds. This is subject to slight measurement inaccuracies; thus, the international community calculates a stable time by averaging accumulated seconds from several clocks worldwide. Next, this figure is compared to a few highly accurate laboratory measurements of the second. Every month, the official world time is adjusted by a few nanoseconds. Politically, time is a cooperative venture; and, by making time an international endeavor, the international community benefits from the combined resources of many laboratories. Leap seconds in universal time coordinated (UTC) World time is typically adjusted every year by adding what is called a "leap second." Because the time calculated by the position of the sun differs from the time calculated by the atomic standard, it is occasionally necessary to adjust international time standards to match the position of the Earth. The rotational speed of the Earth changes slightly for several reasons, some of which are not fully understood. Large-scale movements of water and changes in the atmosphere affect the Earth's angular momentum. Tidal friction from the moon, which results in the rise of tides in the ocean, diminishes the speed of rotation. Physical processes occurring on or within the Earth also affect the earth's rotation  