Growing up in Europe, one is not too familiar with time zones and the impact they have on daily life. Not that you don’t understand what time zones are and why you need them, but the fact that other regions have different times and therefore other living conditions has not become second nature to you. A look at a European time zone map also explains why this is so. Almost all of Western Europe is in one time zone and with two more you can cover Eastern Europe to Asia. For the North American continent you need five, Hawaii and the westernmost tip of Alaska are not yet considered.
One is not aware, or I was not aware, what influence it has on the living conditions. When we lived for a while in western Ohio, the western border in the Eastern Time Zone, I always wondered why I always had to start my morning run in total darkness until I realized that of course at the western border of a time zone the sun rises an hour later than at the eastern border of the same time zone. The morning run in Philadelphia at dawn is a night exercise in western Ohio.
Time zones are just artificially drawn lines, which do not reflect reality sufficiently. While the course of the sun and time are rather analogous matters, we have organized the global time distribution with time zones and thus digitalized it. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan one becomes aware how artificial this border is. Wisconsin and Michigan share this area for some reason. Wisconsin is in the Central Time Zone and Michigan in the Eastern. Obviously there is a borderline and one should assume that it is on the border between the two states, especially since it is determined by the Menominee River, a natural landmark. But far from it. One does not cross the border of the time zones by crossing the river, but rather when one crosses the northern border of the southernmost counties. The southernmost counties on the Michigan Peninsula (Gogebic, Iron, Dickinson and Menominee) are all in the Central Time Zone while the rest are in the Eastern.
I couldn’t fully understand the reason for this strange time zone boundary, but Michigan has a very changing past when it comes to time zones. Standard Times go back to the need of railroad operators to be able to refer to a uniform time. Since noon on November 18, 1883, trains in America have been running through five time zones with a defined Standard Time. Before that, each community had set the time itself. Detroit used 05:32:11 west of Greenwich at that time. So if it was 12 noon in Greenwich, then it was 6:27 minutes and 49 seconds in Detroit. In Menominee, however, it was only 6:10 a.m.
Michigan, and with it Detroit, fell into the Central Time Zone in 1883 and adopted it. However, a club was organized in Detroit in 1907, which succeeded in getting Detroit to move from the Central to the Eastern Time Zone in 1915. Over the years, other municipalities have joined in this move and in 1931 the Michigan Parliament adopted the Eastern Time Zone for the entire state. Daylight Savings Time as we know it today was first introduced as wartime during World War I, first in Europe and then in the States to free up energy for war production. Detroit served as an example back then in the USA and showed how a time shift saves energy.
After the Second World War, “Wartime” was abolished and each state was left to determine its own Daylight Saving Time, which of course led to chaos and a similar situation as before the introduction of Standard Time. In 1966, the American Congress adopted a uniform daylight saving time and the individual states had only the choice to accept it or to abandon daylight saving time altogether. Michigan’s parliament initially rejected daylight saving time, which was also confirmed by a referendum. In 1972, another referendum rejected this rejection and Daylight Saving Time was reintroduced, or introduced for the first time (I lost track). The four counties of Gogebic, Iron, Dickinson and Menominee applied to be assigned to the Central Time Zone. Therefore, the Time Zone today does not run along the national border, but along the northern borders of the southern counties. Unfortunately I could not find out why the counties requested this. Maybe the people in charge were just tired of following Michigan back and forth.
July 14, 2020 – Klaus