Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Benjamin Franklin proposed in 1784 that by rising earlier, people could light
their homes with more sunlight than with candles. The idea of changing
clocks was
first proposed by the British architect William Willett in 1905, who
came up with the idea of moving the clock forward to make better use of
daylight hours. New York passed a local daylight ordinance in 1919 to allow
department stores to turn their lights on as early as possible, tempting com-
muters on their way home, and in the process generating a longer overlap
with the London stock exchange. Pressure in favor of daylight savings came
from the petroleum, retail trade, barbeque, and gol
fi
ng industries, all of
which saw an opportunity for extended sales. In 1966, the U.S. Congress
passed the Uniform Time Act, giving the country six months of Standard
Time and six months of daylight saving. President Nixon famously mandated
year-round daylight saving in 1974 in the face of the OPEC oil embargo.
Today 70 nations with more than one billion inhabitants observe daylight
savings time. Proponents argue that it saves energy, reduces car accidents, and
promotes outdoor activities; detractors, however, maintain that it generates
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fi
culties with children's trips to school and complicates the early morning
schedules of farmers.
Politically and intellectually, WWI toppled the old hierarchies of Europe
and marked the
final death of the Victorian social order. The moral basis of
the Pax Britannica collapsed as conservative virtues emphasizing national
duty, not rights, came into question: if Germany had come to symbolize the
new, bold and modern, Britain embodied the old, conservative, and passé.
The last remnants of feudalism, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
were eliminated, and the Bolshevik Revolution heralded what looked to be a
new socialist world system. In this context of massive change, the Paris
Peace Conference that formally ended the war “was about
fi
fi
fixing the global
geography of modernity” (Smith 2003:143).
Early aviation and the conquest of the air
With aviation, the atmosphere ceased to be an invisible and trivial part of
human movement but was transformed into a mode of transportation, a new
domain of social relations, an arena of con
ict, and a resource that promised
(and delivered) new geographies of accessibility. Aviation marked a de
fl
nitive
moment when twentieth-century time-space compression entered a new phase
of rapidity and intensity.
The history of aviation includes the early experiments of the Montgol
fi
er
brothers in France, who launched a high-altitude balloon in 1783, laying the
technical foundations for lighter-than-air
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fl
flight. Two years later, a balloon
carried J.P. Blanchard and John Je
ff
ries across the English Channel. In 1856,
the
first aerial photographs were taken, of Paris. Gradual improvements in
the design and sturdiness of balloons led to zeppelins and dirigibles, some of
which reached speeds of 40 mph by the 1890s. World War I turned the zep-
pelin into a military vehicle, albeit not a very e
fi
ff
ective one. The German
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