224 



NATURE 



I'JULY 9, 1908 



disturbed; but "local" time is to be established in 

 Great Britain and Ireland an hour in advance of 

 standard time. A steamer is announced to leave 

 Dublin at half past twelve every night, Sundays ex- 

 cepted. What will the announcement mean ? 



There are already two interpretations. Only ex- 

 perience can tell whether it means 12.30 or 12.55 a-m. 

 G.M.T. ; but with the permission of the bill there will 

 be four times which will be legal tender for this 

 denomination, viz. 11.30 p.m., 11.55 P-m., 12.30 

 a.m., 12.55 a.m., G.M.T., and any one of them may 

 be understood or misunderstood in the circumstances. 



The tone of the .Select Committee's report indicates 

 that it thinks confusion between these four times will 

 be obviated with a little practice, and if not, the num- 

 ber of pt^ople who travel from Dublin is so small com- 

 pared with the number of those who do not that they 

 can be disregarded. 



.Some ingenious advocate of the bill has endeavoured 

 to justify it bv a confusion of ideas which finds an 

 analogy between the zone adjustment of standard 

 time for longitude and changing the nominal hour of 

 noon as an adjustment for latitude. The double- 

 edged nature of the false analogy appears to have been 

 overlooked. If sunrise is earlier, sunset is later, and 

 if II should be called 12 on account of the earlier 

 sunrise, ex eqiiali 1 should also be 12 on account of the 

 later sunset; this kind of argument, hollow as it is, 

 has misled a newspaper, generally intelligent, into 

 the grave error of accusing .Scottish clocks of 

 " Iving " because the time of sunset in the far north, 

 as recorded by them, differs by an hour from the 

 scheduled time of sunset for Greenwich ! What 

 sort of clock would the leader writer of the 

 Westminster Gazette prescribe to tell the truth in lati- 

 tude 70°, where at certain times of the year there is 

 no sunrise and at others no sunset? 



There is a further delightful confusion about the 

 bill not being compulsory which enables its advocates 

 to ride away from .-ill sorts of difficulties by explain- 

 ing that if you find it inconvenient vou can use 

 Greenwich time as now. In the report thev dispose in 

 that way of the difliculties of .American business as 

 well as those arising in connection with astronomical, 

 nautical, and scientific work. Any occupation which 

 uses self-recording instruments can also be disposed of 

 quite easily by calling it scientific and allowing it the 

 liberty which, according to the promoters, is not in- 

 fringed by the act. 



What does this liberty mean ? Bv establishing 

 " local " time without compulsion, are either or both 

 local time and Greenwich time to be legal? .And if 

 so, at whose option? May the North- Western Rail- 

 way adopt the act and the Midland decline? .And must 

 the option be exercised once for all at 2 a.m. on the 

 third .Sunday in .April? or can any person change his 

 mind afterwards? Can anyone legallv claim to go to 

 business by Greenwich time and then revise his 

 opinion and demand to leave by local time ? Possiblv 

 the advocates of the bill are acting upon the assump- 

 tion that the convenience of the new time will assert 

 its own compulsion as Greenwich time has done, in 

 every town in Great Britain except the ancient citv of 

 Canterbury. If it does it will be for some other reason 

 than that which has been so effective in the case of 

 Greenwich time. 



The confusion is worse confounded bv the report of 

 the Select Committee. The new time is to be called 

 local time, and the short title of the bill is changed ; it 

 is now called the " Local time (Great Britain and Ire- 

 land) Bill." What kind of confusion are we in now I 

 We thought we knew what local time meant. But 

 between the third Sunday in .April and the third Sun- 

 day in September we are to have the option (there is 



NO. 2019, VOL. 78] 



no compulsion in the bill) of keeping our clucks at local 

 time, and then 5 p.m. as by law " established " will 

 be, we suppose, five hours after local noon, or should 

 it be five local hours after noon and four, or is it six, 

 hours after Greenwich mean noon? Local time must 

 not be confused with middle European time, though 

 the figures will be identical; that is disapproved bv the 

 report. 



.After an elaborate inquiry, which included a pro- 

 longed consultation with the .Astronomer Royal, the 

 Committee seems fo have lost sight of the fact that 

 local time has already a perfectly definite meaning, 

 ruid connotes a time measurement based on " local 

 noon," which is late on Greenwich noon, not an hour 

 in advance of it, as the revised bill declares, for nearly 

 all places in Great Britain and Ireland. 



It seemed incredible at the outset that serious men 

 of business should really confuse themselves between 

 altering the clocks, which was the proposal, and alter- 

 ing the time of occurrence of events, which was the 

 purpose. It seems more certainly incredible that after 

 prolonged inquiry the Committee should have failed to 

 understand that local time has already a meaning, and 

 cannot, even by .Act of Parliament, be made to connote 

 middle European time during the summer months. 

 Vet that is the effect of the bill in its revised form. 



If this new definition of local time is final, the 

 report, which originated with metaphor, cannot, after 

 all, be more than allegory ; but what lesson the 

 allegory is intended to convey is still a mvsterv. 



What has ticl<led the fancy and captivated the 

 imagination of the advocates of the measure is that 

 since the introduction of telegraphs and standard time 

 the control of clocks from Greenwich is so com]3leteIv 

 organised that its very existence is unknown 

 to, perhaps, ninety-nine people out of a hundred, 

 who have come to regard clocks as final 

 timekeepers instead of Greenwich mean time. 

 If this control, which works so smoothly and 

 so surely, were modified so as to make clocks 

 skip an hour in .April, every subsequent event 

 would be made an hour earlier, and yet we should be 

 using the same Bradshaw and the same Postal 

 Guide. The apparent simplicity and the completeness 

 of the operation are very attractive. But one would 

 suppose that the operation would at least require the 

 conniv.-mce rmd active assistance of the controllers of 

 all the clocks, certainly those of all the public clocks in 

 Great Britain and Ireland. That the promoters know 

 to be impossible, so, by the bill, the change is 

 imagined to take place — it cannot actuallv take place 

 — in the deadest of the dead of night, when there will 

 be practically nobody to see that the clocks are not 

 moved. This, again, is curious in an .Act of Parlia- 

 ment. To ]jrescribe that a certain operation shall take 

 place at a time which has been selected because pre- 

 sumably there will be fewer people in a position to 

 carry out the order than at any other time, is fine 

 allegory but bad legislation. 



Herein is further confusion of ideas arising from 

 the notion that if an order is given to alter the clocks 

 subsequent events will be therebv accelerated. .Subse- 

 quent events may be accelerated, but it will be in 

 pursuance of orders to accelerate them. It is incon- 

 ceivable, for example, that such a body as that which 

 controls the \orth-Western Railway will be content to 

 alter the clocks in the dead of night and expect all 

 subsequent events advanced an hour without express 

 orders given to everybody concerned to accelerate by 

 an hour whatever he has to do on Sundav, or for the 

 large majority on Monday morning. In that case it is 

 clear that the operative cause lies in the orders given, 

 and not in the alteration of the clocks, which is a 

 mere trivial circumstance, and might be omitted with- 



