Spring forward, but look back to Pittsburgh man who pushed daylight saving time

Industrialist Andrew Carnegie gave the nation his libraries, charities and museums; Henry Clay Frick's name would be given to parks and museums.

But Americans owe another Pittsburgh industrialist for that bleary-eyed feeling they'll have Sunday morning after daylight saving time takes effect: Factory owner and city councilman Robert Garland was one of the twice-yearly time shift's biggest proponents in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century.

Garland immigrated to Pittsburgh as a teenager and rose in the manufacturing industry making nuts, bolts and conduits. He served on Pittsburgh City Council from 1911 to 1939 and first became interested in daylight saving time after observing Britain's use of it to gain an extra hour to tend their “war gardens” during World War I.

“Mr. Garland immediately began a constant crusade which put daylight saving into effect in Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, in numerous other states, and resulted, years after his death, in the present federal law,” wrote Carlton G. Ketchum for the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania in 1975 . “Its benefits have become so apparent that its permanence is no longer questioned.”

Shifting clocks ahead an hour in the spring was touted by advocates such as Garland as a way to save electricity and wring more productivity or leisure out of the lengthening days. It was applied inconsistently at times — mandated nationally as “war time” during the first and second World Wars, breaking down to a patchwork of state- and even town-level decisions from the late 1940s until the 1960s, then standardized across the country by federal law in 1966.

Since then, time zones and daylight saving time have been administered by the Department of Transportation, but the dates that we “fall back” and “spring forward” have crept over the years. It used to start in April and end in October; during the energy crisis of the 1970s, the government experimented with moving ahead an hour for all of 1973.

Congress most recently extended it in 2007 so daylight saving runs from 2 a.m. the second Sunday in March to 2 a.m. the first Sunday in November. The time shift can fall anywhere from March 8 to March 13, and shifts back to “Standard Time” Nov. 1 through Nov. 7, depending on how the days fall on the calendar.

Critics say the safety and productivity benefits in the evening are countered by an increased likelihood of crashes or workplace accidents in the early morning. A petition to “End Daylight Savings Time” at petition2congress.com had collected more than 136,000 signers by Friday.

“It has been suggested that as a society we are chronically sleep-deprived and that small additional losses of sleep may have consequences for public and individual safety,” Canadian professor Stanley Coren wrote to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1996. “Although one hour's change may seem like a minor disruption in the cycle of sleep and wakefulness, measurable changes in sleep pattern persist for up to five days after each time shift.”

Theorizing that disrupted sleep could increase lapses of attention behind the wheel, Coren found an increase in crashes across Canada the Monday after clocks “spring forward,” though other studies would dispute his findings.

Governors or legislatures can petition the secretary of Transportation to opt out: Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands and most of Arizona have all been exempted from the time changes.

Given its strong association with daylight saving time, perhaps it's not surprising Pennsylvania hasn't had any recent proposals to opt out. But the state Senate has repeatedly adopted resolutions that recognize the week of the spring transition as “sleep awareness week.”

Matthew Santoni is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at 724-836-6660, msantoni@tribweb.com or via Twitter @msantoni.