Clocks go back but Bedfordshire MP urges longer daylight saving
www.bbc.co.uk
Alex Mayer wants the government to increase daylight by two hours to boost the economy.

At the end of the article, there’s this interesting fact:

King Edward VII invented his own timezone for the royal estate in Sandringham, Norfolk, in 1901 to squeeze in half-an-hour more hunting time each day

  • Zachariah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    293·
    26 days ago

    half-an-hour more hunting time each day

    time zones can’t make more time available

    • Sasha@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      12·
      26 days ago

      It’s about daylight savings, it provided more daylight to hunt in the evening, presumably because the day’s other activities ended earlier.

      • Zachariah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        67·
        26 days ago

        He was the king. He had the power to make people spend less time each day doing activities-other-than-hunting rather than force them to wake up earlier by doing this time zone nonsense.

    • nogooduser@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      26 days ago

      You can make the time that you have more useful though.

      There are activities that you can do in the dark and some that you can’t do in the dark. I imagine that they wanted to sleep in late which was cutting into hunting time so they changed the time zone so that it was dark while they were sleeping and light a bit later to allow for more hunting.

      It’s why we have daylight saving time.

      • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
        111·
        26 days ago

        My whole life I’ve heard people say that. It’s as if they don’t realize they’re just tricking themselves.

        You can’t actually change when the sun rises or sets. You can only change the arbitrarily chosen number that time is labeled with. You’re still getting up earlier, while telling yourself you didn’t, because the number is the same. If you wanted to get up earlier you could just do that with the normal numbers. It would be exactly the same. The time change doesn’t effect anything real.

        • ZwiebelEnglish
          51·
          26 days ago

          It works because certain numbers are socially ingrained. For example 8 a.m. is the normal time schools start here

        • nogooduser@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          26 days ago

          It is arbitrary, yes. Part of the reason for daylight savings time was simply to match most people’s waking hours to a standard time throughout the year.