The use of BST is still hotly debated in Britain. At 1am on 31 March, the last Sunday of the month, clocks will go forward one hour, marking the start of seven months of daylight saving time. British Summer Time BST , otherwise known as daylight saving time, was originally devised to keep factories open for longer in the summer — since there was enough light to do so.
It has also been suggested that BST reduces energy consumption. In the days of coal fires and tallow lamps, this may have been true, says Forbes , but the advent of electrical light has wiped out much of this saving. Willett, a builder from southeast London, proposed the idea after growing frustrated with having to cut short his rounds of golf at dusk. He self-published a pamphlet called Waste of Daylight , which suggested that the clocks would move back 20 minutes each day for several days, to a total of 80 minutes.
Germany brought in summer time in so that it could keep munitions factories open longer — and the UK immediately followed suit. In , the nation was put on Double British Summer Time — two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time in the summer and one hour ahead during winter.
This was intended both to increase productivity in the war industries and to help workers get home before the blackout began.
The scheme was abandoned three years later. With the promise of longer days and more sunshine, over the years there have been repeated calls for British Summer Time to be made permanent. The latest research estimates that around lives would be saved a year by preventing accidents in the dark evenings, it says. Economy: Even after Brexit, it would have the economic benefit of putting UK businesses in the same time zone as most of their European counterparts.
Environment: Cambridge University researchers also found that year-round BST would reduce CO2 pollution by at least , tonnes each year, the equivalent to more than 50, cars driving all the way around the world. At a. So, can bars serve alcohol for that additional hour?
Some states claim that bars actually stop serving liquor at a. Other states solve the problem by saying that liquor can be served until "two hours after midnight. Most people were at home and this was the time when the fewest trains were running. It is late enough to minimally affect bars and restaurants, and it prevents the day from switching to yesterday, which would be confusing.
It is early enough that the entire continental U. For the U. The Navajo Nation participates in the Daylight Saving Time policy, even in Arizona, due to its large size and location in three states. Many fire departments encourage people to change the batteries in their smoke detectors when they change their clocks because Daylight Saving Time provides a convenient reminder. More than 90 percent of homes in the United States have smoke detectors, but one-third are estimated to have dead or missing batteries.
See more information about elsewhere in the world. Scotland heavily favours the status quo, as switching to DST all year round would result in sunrise after 10am in some parts. About 70 countries observe daylight saving time. Most countries around the equator do not, as there is little variation in daylight across the year.
Most Islamic countries do not use daylight saving time as during Ramadan it can mean that the evening dinner is delayed till later in the day. Morocco suspends DST during the fast. Iran utilises DST, with no discontinuation for Ramadan. Most of east Asia and Africa does not use daylight saving time. This year the European parliament voted to scrap daylight saving time by If ratified, it could throw up yet another Brexit-related headache.
If the UK leaves the EU before and the bloc goes ahead with its plan to scrap DST, a situation could arise in which for half the year Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland would be in different time zones.
On the upside, it might allow for grabbing a quick sandwich to eat in, say, Derry before popping across the border to Donegal and having lunch again. In our modern age of digital watches, smartphones, rail timetables and synchronised calendars, it may seem that time is fixed and orderly. This is not the case. Before the technology developed to reliably tell the time, people structured their time much more loosely.
Ancient civilisations divided the daylight into 12 hours no matter how long or short daytime was. This meant daylight hours became longer during the spring and summer and shorter in the autumn and the winter. We know this to be the case in ancient Rome as the Romans kept time using water clocks with different scales for different months.
Even as mechanical clocks and timepieces began to be invented, time still varied widely from place to place.
0コメント