Helpful or not? The Daylight Saving Time debate continues

Daylight Saving Time started on Sunday, March 11.

Once again, we must take inventory of the things that tell time around the home that still need our help to “spring forward." There have been several ideas about how we might most effectively do away this twice yearly headache.

Florida lawmakers sent HB 1013, the “Sunshine Protection Act," to the governor this week to to make this weekend’s time change permanent in the state. Even if Gov. Rick Scott signs the bill into law, Congress still must amend the federal Uniform Time Act of 1966 to allow Florida to join Arizona and Hawaii in the list of states which do not observe daylight saving time.

Don't forget: Spring forward Saturday night

To further complicate matters, Florida wants to stay “sprung forward” on daylight saving time while Arizona and Hawaii have chosen to remain “fallen back” on standard time. Florida also lies in both the eastern and central time zones.

Daylight Saving Time is an attempt to align the unchanging 24 hours in a day with the changing hours of sunlight as the seasons pass. Though daylight saving dates back to the late 1800s, time systems have been trying to better align the hours of the day with the time the sun is above the horizon.

Roman water clocks had different scales for the months of the year. The traditional method of timekeeping in Japan uses temporal hours, which align with the changing length of daylight.

That system, in use until the late 1800s, divides daylight and night hours into six parts, or temporal hours. During winter, the six “hours” of night are longer than those during the day, and day hours longer than night ones in the summer. This system can be thought of as measuring time more slowly during summer daylight hours and winter nighttime hours and more quickly during summer nights and winter days. Clocks which use this system are called wadokei.

In 1851, Hisashige Tanaka, who has been called Japan’s Thomas Edison, built the myriad year clock to represent Japanese time and the calendar mechanically. This wadokei included a steadily moving hour hand which completed a rotation every 24 hours. The number scale around the dial moved with the seasons.

For example, at the summer solstice, when the days are at their longest, night hours bunch together at the bottom of the dial while daylight hours spread out across the top and sides of the dial.

In 2011, Masahiro Kikuno, an independent watchmaker from Tokyo, created a first of its kind mechanical wadokei wristwatch. Viewing through a microscope, Kikuno shaves the hundreds of gears, springs and parts a micron (about the width of a red blood cell) at a time. Each watch requires six months to hand build and is tuned to the latitude of the customer to ensure synchronization with the changing sunrise and set times throughout the year.

If the ebb and flow of the hours in the Japanese system sounds good to you, Masahiro Kikuno will make you a wadokei watch for only 18 million yen ($168,660). I think I'll just reset the clock on the microwave for now.