From Cincinnati Post May 20, 1909
It’s that dreaded week following the annual “spring forward” as we turn our timepieces toward Daylight Saving Time. Having lost an hour, our weary brains endeavor to recalibrate our circadian rhythms while our biological clocks wail in agony. Who is the idiot who devised this semiannual torture? Cincinnatians have one of our own to blame. His name was Edward H. Murdock.
Mr. Murdock was the president of the Queen City Printing Ink Company, known as “The Oldest and Largest Printing Ink Works in The West,” with branches in Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia. Around 1907, he vacationed in England and was impressed by the long summer days enjoyed by inhabitants of that sceptered isle. According to the Cincinnati Post [May 20, 1909]:
“‘That set me to thinking,’ says Murdock. ‘And it came to me all at once that what we lacked geographically we could make up by freedom from the slavery of the clock. I thought of all the objections to the idea I could think of, and found that they wouldn’t hold water.’”
Although Murdock claimed credit for the idea, he had vacationed in England just about the time that nation was debating Daylight Saving at the instigation of prominent builder and outdoorsman William Willett. Without mention of Willett, Murdock had some circulars printed up extolling his idea—essentially to adjust clocks by two hours from May through September—and plopped them onto the lobby desk of the Business Men’s Club. Murdock’s name appeared nowhere on the document, and he bided his time as discussion flowed out of the clubrooms and into the newspapers. After a week or so of speculation about the origin of the circulars, Murdock stepped out from behind the curtain to form the National Daylight Association. Within a month, his organization sent a delegation to Washington where they got the support of President William Howard Taft. The Cincinnati Post was enthusiastic:
“In two weeks an Idea that started in the brain of a Cincinnati man has grown into the biggest single national thought of the moment; it is gaining more popular discussion than the tariff; newspapers are writing up and making funny pictures of the Idea; the President and his Cabinet are thinking about the Idea very seriously; knockers are trying to find flaws in the Idea and find themselves on a futile job, and nearly everybody else is wondering why nobody in the United States ever before thought about turning the clock back two hours and getting two more hours of daylight out of a summers day.”
From “Cincinnatians As We See ‘Em” 1905
To be honest, other people had thought about something very close to Murdock’s idea. As early as 1784, Ben Franklin satirically proposed a system along the same lines. He didn’t take the idea seriously and neither did anyone at the time. None of Murdock’s predecessors had inspired a national debate on the matter.
Once Murdock’s idea got national traction, the response was far from universally positive. The Catholic Columbian, diocesan newspaper of Columbus, Ohio, deplored the entire concept [July 23, 1909]:
“This is an absurd piece of legislation, which is certain to fail for want of observance on the part of the people. The daylight-saving movement is a fad and a fallacy. It is bound to come to an untimely end.”
According to the Catholic Columbian, the measure was unnecessary, confusing, useless and—most notoriously—an importation, and the Catholic Columbian would have nothing to do with a plan that originated in England.
Likewise, Watson’s Jeffersonian Magazine [September 1909], after eviscerating the English Daylight plan, went after Cincinnati’s initiative:
“The ludicrous imitators in America, styling themselves the National Daylight Association of Cincinnati, would do well to agree among themselves to get up before day, but to let the American public have its breakfast at just about the same time it has been accustomed to for some several hundred years.”
There were some heavy-duty supporters of the Daylight Saving idea, including the esteemed Journal of the American Medical Association:
“In a word, we have very probably in this movement for prolonging the usefulness of daylight one of the most important hygienic ameliorations that can now be made for all classes of people. Doubtless the working classes would benefit even more than most others because, while their fatigue requires them to go to bed early, the activity of life around them often seriously disturbs their sleep during the hours before midnight which should be so precious. Let us hope that so simple and efficient a means of lessening one of the unhygienic tendencies of our day will receive the consideration it deserves.”
The Kansas City Star congratulated Cincinnati on a useful and easily effected benefit, noting that, if adopted nationally, the new time system would require no major alterations to railroad or factory schedules. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch suggested, because Cincinnati had so recently installed the first lighting system in the nation for its major-league ballpark, the Daylight Saving plan was just a ploy to get more fans into the stands for night games.
Despite the national attention, Mr. Murdock’s idea never got more than local traction and wasn’t adopted for quite some time. Among the reasons for ignoring Daylight Saving Time was the chaotic nature of time itself in the United States. For decades, the only official time was “sun time,” which meant that every city and town in the country had its own local time. Noon in Cincinnati was several minutes later than noon in Cleveland, which was quite a bit later than noon in New York and so on.
A huge innovation arrived in November 1883, when almost all North American railroads adopted a standard time system. Under this system, Cincinnati was placed in the Central Time Zone. “Railroad Time” was 22 minutes slower than “Cincinnati Time.” Detroit was 28 minutes fast while Indianapolis was 10 minutes slow. Louisville was 18 minutes fast and St. Louis was one minute slow.
If you had anything to do with the railroads, you might have adopted “Railroad Time,” but most Cincinnatians stuck with “Cincinnati Time.” Hotels, in particular, scheduled employees on “City Time” and served guests on “Railroad Time.” The switch to Daylight Saving Time, then, did not require federal approval; Cincinnati City Council adopted the idea in 1909, but declined to actually implement the measure. It took World War I and efforts to conserve candles and coal that led to a wartime national adoption of Daylight Saving Time. National (mostly) implementation of Daylight Saving Time did not occur until 1966.
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