首页 | 主题 | 图库 | 问答 | 文摘 | 原创 | 百科

历史 | 地理 | 人物 | 艺术 | 体育 | 科学 | 音乐 | 电影 | 信息技术 | 世界遗产

 开放、中立,源自维基百科

Personal tools

Daylight saving time

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
Map of daylight saving time around the world. Although common in high latitudes, most people do not use DST.      DST used      DST no longer used      DST never used
Map of daylight saving time around the world. Although common in high latitudes, most people do not use DST.      DST used      DST no longer used      DST never used

Daylight saving time (DST) is the convention of advancing clocks so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn. Modern DST was first proposed in 1907 by William Willett. Many countries have used it since then; details vary by location and change occasionally.

The practice is controversial.[1] Adding daylight to afternoons benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours,[2] but causes problems for farming, entertainment and other occupations tied to the sun.[3][4] Extra afternoon daylight reduces traffic fatalities;[5] its effect on health and crime is less clear. An early goal of DST was to reduce evening usage of incandescent lighting, formerly a primary use of electricity;[6] modern heating and cooling usage patterns can cause DST to increase electricity consumption.[7]

DST's clock shifts can serve as fire safety reminders,[8] but they complicate timekeeping and can disrupt meetings, travel, billing, recordkeeping, medical devices, and heavy equipment.[9] Many computer-based systems can adjust their clocks automatically, but this can be limited and error-prone, particularly when DST rules change.[10]

Contents

Origin

In this ancient water clock, a series of gears rotated a cylinder to display hour lengths appropriate for each day's date.
In this ancient water clock, a series of gears rotated a cylinder to display hour lengths appropriate for each day's date.

Although not punctual in the modern sense, ancient civilizations adjusted daily schedules to the sun more flexibly than modern DST does, often dividing daylight into 12 equal hours regardless of day length, so that each daylight hour was longer during summer.[11] For example, Roman water clocks had different scales for different months of the year: at Rome's latitude the third hour from sunrise, hora tertia, started by modern standards at 09:02 solar time and lasted 44 minutes at the winter solstice, but at the summer solstice it started at 06:58 and lasted 75 minutes.[12] After ancient times, equal-length civil hours eventually supplanted unequal, so civil time no longer varies by season. Unequal hours are still used in a few traditional settings, such as some Mount Athos monasteries.[13]

Benjamin Franklin suggested firing cannons at sunrise to waken Parisians.
Benjamin Franklin suggested firing cannons at sunrise to waken Parisians.

During his time as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, author of the proverb, "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise", anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight.[14] This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise.[15] Franklin did not propose DST; like ancient Rome, 18th-century Europe did not keep accurate schedules. However, this soon changed as rail and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in Franklin's day.[16]

Image:William-Willett.jpg
William Willett invented DST and advocated it tirelessly.[17]

The prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett invented DST in 1905 during one of his pre-breakfast horseback rides, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through the best part of a summer day.[18] An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk. His solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later.[19] He lobbied unsuccessfully for the proposal until his death in 1915; see Politics for more details.

Germany, its World War I allies, and their occupied zones were the first European nations to use Willett's invention, starting April 30, 1916. Britain, most of its allies, and many European neutrals soon followed suit; Russia and a few other countries waited until the next year; and the United States adopted it in 1918. Since then, the world has seen many enactments, adjustments, and repeals.[20]

Benefits and drawbacks

Willett's 1907 proposal argued that DST increases opportunities for outdoor leisure activities during afternoon sunlight hours. Obviously it does not change the length of the day; the longer days nearer the summer solstice in high latitudes merely offer more room to shift apparent daylight from morning to evening so that early morning daylight is not wasted.[19] DST is commonly not observed during most of winter, because its mornings are darker: workers may have no sunlit leisure time, and children may need to leave for school in the dark.[21]

General agreement about the day's layout confers so many advantages that a standard DST schedule usually outranks ad hoc efforts to get up earlier, even for people who personally dislike the DST schedule.[22] The advantages of coordination are so great that many people ignore whether DST is in effect by altering their nominal work schedules to coordinate with daylight, television broadcasts, or remote colleagues.[23]

Energy use

Delaying the nominal time of sunset and sunrise reduces the use of artificial light in the evening and increases it in the morning. As Franklin's 1784 satire pointed out, lighting costs are reduced if the evening reduction outweighs the morning increase, as in high-latitude summer when most people wake up well after sunrise. An early goal of DST was to reduce evening usage of incandescent lighting, formerly a primary use of electricity.[6] Although energy conservation remains an important goal,[24] studies are contradictory, and suggest that DST can increase energy use in some common cases:

Languages
AD Links