Saving The Daylight | Granta

  • Published: 06/03/2014
  • ISBN: 9781783780525
  • Granta Books
  • 224 pages

Saving The Daylight

David S. Prerau

Benjamin Franklin conceived it. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle endorsed it. Winston Churchill campaigned for it. Kaiser Wilhelm first employed it. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt went to war with it. Every spring the clocks go forward, and every autumn they go back. Saving the Daylight explores for the first time the contentious, and often entertaining, story of this deceptively simple attempt to regulate the sunlight hours. Throughout its surprisingly controversial history, Daylight Saving Time has been claimed to have influenced a wide variety of areas, including agricultural practices, the reporting of sports scores, street crime, voter turnout and many other, sometimes unexpected aspects of daily life. The book brings together the historical, political and technical aspects of the fascinating story behind the movement for DST, with many light and offbeat anecdotes.

A fascinating and unusual book. It contained points I didn't know, and I enjoyed it immensely

Sir Patrick Moore

This entertaining book is likely to make your head spin ... Plenty of hilarious anecdotes here about the chaos that followed most attempts to save daylight around the world

New Scientist

A neat account of the attempt to regulate daylight ... don't hit the snooze button if Saving the Daylight is on the bedside table

Sunday Express

The Author

David Prerau has a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is one of the world’s foremost experts on daylight saving time. He has authored/co-authored three extensive US Government reports to Congress on daylight saving time, and has written two books, Developing and Managing Expert Systems and Worldwide Intelligent Systems.

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