The Born Loser by Art and Chip Sansom for March 13, 2016

There’s no reason for “Daylight Savings” time in the first place.It was set up to account for the fact that the eggheads at the Royal Observatory made their time calculations at the wrong place on the globe—instead of where the Equator met the Prime Meridian, these eggheads made their calculations where the Prime Meridian crossed the 55th North Parallel at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.To make matters worse, the stuffshirts in the Colonial Office on Fleet Street and the brass at the Admiralty’s Office enforced the miscalculations and in turn forced them on us, who were too lazy to do things differently.The eggheads failed to take into account that there is a 23 degree tilt in the Earth’s rotational axis and that makes things a little off along the Prime Meridian, where southern latitudes may see the sun rise and set at different times than what is observed at the Royal Observatory.To make up for this miscalculation, especially at the lower lattitudes below 55 Degrees North Lattitude, “Daylight Savings Time” was proposed in the 18th Century and implemented at times in the 19th Century, especially after the development of electric light and that to save on both power and the life of these bulbs in the Summer months when the sun was at the Tropic of Cancer instead of the Equator, Daylight Savings Time was implemented so that factories could keep on producing, especially ammunition and war materiel during World War I.After the war, Daylight Savings Time was dropped, but resumed for World War II, where it became the standard to this day.The problem here still goes back to the original miscalculations that the eggheads at the Royal Observatory made and that we may have to scrap it in favor of local conditions where the sun rises and falls at various places instead of one.The problem being that the sun does not always rise and fall at the same time even in the same arbitrarily assigned time zone, where given the Earth’s rotation, the sun rises sooner in the eastern areas of a given time zone than in the western areas—for instance, if the sun rises in Colby, Kansas at 7:00am, it won’t rise in Colorado Springs, Colorado until 7:30am even though both places are in Mountain Time Zone, and it will be past 8:00am the same day in Richfield, Utah when the sun rises, there, which is also in the same time zone as both Colby and Colorado Springs, when the sun rises in Richfield and all these places are along the same latitude in the same time zone. We probably need some more time zones set up based on local conditions so instead of 24, perhaps we need 48 or even more.