Daylight Saving Time And The World Timer: A History Of Coping With A Terrible Idea

The idea behind Daylight Saving Time is a pretty simple one – setting the clocks ahead an hour, in the Spring (which is what we’re going to do this Sunday, March 8, at 2AM) is intended to extend the number of useful daylight hours, and was also originally proposed as a way of saving energy during the first World War; the Germans were the first to adopt DST, in 1916, and the US followed suit in 1918, with the idea becoming enshrined by statute by the Uniform Time Act of 1966. The idea itself is flawed; energy savings from reduced consumption are minimal and largely offset by costs associated with increased pollution, as well as the physical impact on the human body caused by disruptions to circadian rhythms, which include a 20% increase in cardiac events on the Monday after DST is implemented.

From a horological perspective, DST adds an arbitrary problem on top of another arbitrary problem. This is particularly noticeable in world time watches which as everyone knows, are designed to show the time, simultaneously, in a selection of time zones around the world. Usually world time watches have city disks with the names of major cities located in each of the different time zones printed on them and the vast majority of such watches ignore any time zone with non-full hour offsets from GMT. This already limits the practicality of world time watches for travelers, and the problem is exacerbated by the adoption of Daylight Saving Time in some countries but not others, for which world time watches cannot account. On top of everything else, neither time zones nor Daylight Saving Time represent natural temporal cycles – they are established by governments and can be changed by the stroke of a pen, which means that not only do most world time watches fail to account for DST, but they can also be rendered incorrect and obsolete at the stroke of a pen, should the time zones adopted by any country change.

Modern Problems, Modern Solutions: The Bovet Récital Prowess 1

Purely from a practical perspective, for a traveler the best solution for many years is to use a dual time watch, which can be adjusted to home time DST, and which can also show at will, a DST adjustment in a second time zone, although the problem of time zones with non-full hour offsets from GMT remains. In world time watches two of the most recent attempts to take on the problem of DST, are the Bovet Récital Prowess 1, which was released in 2024, and Greubel Forsey’s Balancier Convexe GMT, which was released in 2022 and which is the latest of GF’s GMT complications. These two watches cope with the problem in different ways, both of which are interesting but very different approaches.

The Bovet Récital Prowess 1 has the reference city names printed, not on a disk, but on four-sided rollers. The rollers can be rotated from the crown, and all of the rollers rotate simultaneously when the crown is pushed in. An indicator to the left of the city rollers shows whether you have adjusted the cities to show standard time, the advent of AST (American Summer Time) EAS, or the combination of European and American Summer time (necessary since Europe and the USA switch from standard to Summer time on different dates) or UTC (standard time around the world, when neither Europe or the US are observing DST).

This is to date, the only world time watch which actually adjusts the position of reference cities relative to the 25 hour disk to properly account for the switch between Summer and standard time. It’s not a totally complete solution for every country around the world, since Australia and Chilé (for instance) observe DST relative to the advent of Summer in the Southern Hemisphere, but it’s the closest anyone has ever gotten to a true mechanical solution.

Intelligent Simplicity: The Balancier Convexe GMT From Greubel Forsey

The solution implemented in the Balancier Convexe GMT is not a mechanical one per se, although it has the advantage of simplicity and is easy to use despite the fact that it requires the owner to do a little mental arithmetic.

On the back of the watch, there’s a city disk with 24 reference cities and their position with respect to two 24 hour disks. The cities are displayed either on white backgrounds or black backgrounds. The cities where DST is observed are on white backgrounds, and you’ll notice that the inner 24 hour ring is one hour ahead of the outer ring. If you know that DST is in effect in a particular time zone, you just read the time off the inner rather than the outer disk.

Like the Bovet Récital Prowess 1, this does not account for non-full hour offsets from GMT nor for DST observations in the global South, but it is an ingenious solution to the general problem of showing DST times in a world time watch.

Versatility From Louis Vuitton: The Escale Twin Zone

Since the last time we discussed the problem of world time/GMT watches and DST (as well as the time zone issue) there has been an interesting addition to the small range of watches from those categories which attempt to address the non-hour offset time zones, and the DST problem. The Louis Vuitton Escale Twin Zone was just released earlier this year at LVMH Watch Week, and it has an hour and a minute hand for both home and local time, which I think is a first for the GMT complication.

The hour hand can be set in one hour increments from the crown, but should you find yourself in a non-hour offset time zone, you can also further adjust local time with the second time zone minute hand. GMT watches are inherently capable of coping with DST, and the Escale Twin Zone extends that capability to time zones where DST is observed but which have non-hour offsets as well. It’s therefore the most versatile of any current or past GMT watch and while it doesn’t have the sheer complexity of the Bovet Récital Prowess 1 (which is also, lest we forget, a perpetual calendar with tourbillon as well) it’s become the watch to beat in the GMT category, at least in terms of versatility.

Future Perfect: Making A Complete World Time DST Complication

The question remains as to whether or not it will ever be possible to construct a world time watch which is capable of handling both of the two most intractable world time challenges at the same time – that is, showing the time in all time zones, not just 24 with full hour offsets; and also correctly showing changes due to switching back and forth from Summer to standard time. If you really wanted to push it, you could also ask for a watch that took into account switching to Summer time in countries that do so in the global south. I can’t imagine what such a watch would even look like, much less how it would be implemented mechanically, but I’m reasonably sure that despite the fact that such a watch would be less a comprehensive expression of natural cycles, and more a sort of snapshot of the state of legislated timekeeping and its national variations, that someone somewhere is trying to figure it out.