Chapter 1: What historical context led to the concept of standard time?
Once upon a time, in the 19th century, the sun was demoted. Its light drifts between the tall chimneys and finds a line of workers at the gate. They yawn, rub their eyes, and the light whispers, Relax, you're early. Inside, the foreman flips open a silver pocket watch. One tiny twist and the factory clock jumps forward. The clock shouts, you're late, get moving.
The sunlight softens, limbs grow heavy, bodies are ready to stop. But then the watch comes out again. Another twist. This time the hands slide back and the day magically stretches itself. The sun doesn't argue. It clocks out as usual, gracefully accepting the memo that it is no longer the boss. Now, time belongs to whoever controls the watch.
Welcome to Life Without, where I take something away from the sum of life, a constant in our equation, just subtract it with my powers, delete it, done. No warning, no second chances, just the maths. Will the result be positive or disastrously negative? Or will it simply leave us divided?
For BBC Radio 4, this is Life Without with me, Alan Davis, and together we'll find out whether a life without standard time turns out to be the answer we all hope for.
Personally, I love long evenings. I love the alfresco meals. But there is a biological cost.
To be the voice of our internal biological clocks is Dr. R.T. Jaganath, Associate Professor at the University of Oxford's Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute. And to walk me back through history is Rebecca Struthers, watchmaker, historian and author of Hands of Time, A Watchmaker's History of Time.
The earliest watches actually only had an hour hand on them. One philosophers have later theorised that the time, more accurately to an hour a day, just wasn't as important to us back then.
When you nudge the clock forward or back, that tiny twist of the dial can mean, yes, energy savings, or, hey, my circadian rhythms are working for me. Today, we're jumping to the last Sunday of March and staying on summertime for a whole year. Winter never gets its hour back. In our little world, it's been one week since the clock changed to summertime. Rebecca, why is it called Daylight Saving?
Daylight Saving Time, as we know it today, is often credited to William Willett, who published a paper called The Waste of Daylight in 1907. William didn't live to see the introduction of Daylight Saving Time. That was first introduced during the First World War. But it was around the idea that we could save energy. So for efficiency, we could create more daylight in the evenings.
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Chapter 2: How does Daylight Saving Time affect our biological clocks?
So just take the curtains and the blinds out of their bedrooms.
In the mornings, yes, and then take away the device in the evening.
When we all sign up to this shared social time, like summertime, what does that actually mean?
Time is such a social and cultural thing. It's evolved with us over thousands and thousands of years. The 365-day year was first discovered by the ancient Egyptians, who also invented the sundial 3,500 years ago. So that was the point we first started to break up the day. Clock time actually gave us what we think of as our day-to-day in terms of hours of uniform length.
Before that, we used to have the same 24 hours in a day, but 12 of those would be daytime and 12 of them would be nighttime. And the result of that was we get 12 longer hours in the summer for daytime and 12 shorter hours for night and the reverse in winter. But clocks being machines, they want to do the same thing over and over again.
So it's the invention of the clock really that started to drive us towards the idea of having hours of uniform length. Having the extra hour of sunshine in the evening gives us more time to socialise, whether it's meeting friends after work, going out for picnics. It's also great for tourism. They've calculated it could benefit the economy by billions of pounds a year.
So we've had our first week of permanent summertime and perhaps we're all a bit cranky, but there are daffodils. We're looking forward to summer picnics. Six months in, end of October, normally the clocks would be turning back, but we're staying in summer, at least by name. In the wintertime, we might get about eight hours of daylight.
We're supposed to sleep for 16 hours, sort of virtual hibernation.
Dormouse. It'd be lovely, wouldn't it? It would. A lot of animals do do that. They compress the hours that they're active in and they expand when they're sleeping. But as humans, what matters to us is the 24-hour regularity, not necessarily how much of that is sunlight.
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Chapter 3: What are the health implications of changing the clocks?
So we'd have no technology at all. Media, TV, radio.
I'm loving it.
Yeah.
So it's the last Sunday in March. We've had a full year on summertime. Do I make permanent summer the new normal?
I quite like summertime, I'm going to be honest.
I love the late evenings as well. But that's not necessarily going to be cheap to our bodies. I can't decide.
We think because we built the clock, we own the time. But even after centuries of civilisation, our bodies are still living on the savannah, waiting for the sunrise. You tug at that natural rhythm to catch an extra hour of light, the entire modern world gets cranky. Maybe we should stop trying to bend time to fit our busy lives and start bending our lives to fit the time.
A massive thank you to Dr Artie Juggernauth and Rebecca Struthers. Next time on Life Without, the tectonic titan that bridges our oceans and fuels the modern world is ripped right off the map. Join me for a life without North America. Life Without Standard Time was produced by Rian Moussa with support from Michelle Martin. Robina Pabani is the executive producer.
Emily Jarvis is production manager and sound designer. Mix is by Nick Handley and Tom Butner. The commissioning editor for Radio 4 is Rhian Roberts. This is an ITN production for BBC Radio 4. Subscribe to Life Without on BBC Sounds and turn on push notifications to ensure you never miss an episode.
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