I have located the 1922 Summer Time Order (Statutory Rules and Orders 1922 number 264), the last remaining untraced piece of UK legislation on Summer Time, in the Public Record Office (PRO: HO 45/11079/418515). This confirms the start and end of British Summer Time in 1922 to be Sunday 26 March to Sunday 8 October, both at 02:00 GMT. The file contains ten copies of the Order (one signed and bearing a seal), and one of the 1921 Order, but none of the Isle of Man order (S. R. & O. 1922 no. 290), which is as yet untraced. The papers in that file include letters instructing that copies of the Order be communicated to the Channel Islands, which suggests that Summer Time may have been used there. There are several files on Summer Time in HO 45 (Home Office Registered Papers) that I have not yet looked at; these are indexed under "Daylight Savings" with no cross-reference from "Summer Time". HO 380 (Summer Time and Calendars) contains files from 1962 to 1967. (The Order states that the termination of the War was defined as 31 August 1921 (!), which means that it was made within the powers of the War Emergency Laws (Continuance) Act.) People seeking copies of the Summer Time Orders should note that the following are not in the annual volumes: SR&O 1917 No. 362, SR&O 1921 No. 363, SR&O 1921 No. 364 - get from the Statutory Publications Office. SR&O 1922 No. 264 - get from the PRO (in HO 45/11079/418515). SR&O 1922 No. 290 - untraced. SR&O 1940 No. 172, SR&O 1944 No. 932, SR&O 1945 No. 312, SI 1948/495, SI 1949/373, SI 1950/518, SI 1951/430, SI 1951/451 - get from the British Library. -- Joseph S. Myers jsm28@cam.ac.uk

From "mathew "@ican.net Fri Mar 27 03:51:09 1998 Return-Path: <"mathew "@ican.net> Received: from mail0.tor.acc.ca ([204.92.54.110]) by elsie.nci.nih.gov (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA05269; Fri, 27 Mar 98 03:51:09 EST Received: from 142.154.112.51 (ppp-157.m2-2.van.ican.net [142.154.112.157]) by mail0.tor.acc.ca (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id DAA02950 for <tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov>; Fri, 27 Mar 1998 03:51:03 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199803270851.DAA02950@mail0.tor.acc.ca> Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 00:51:08 -0800 From: Mathew Englander <"mathew "@ican.net> X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (Macintosh; I; PPC) Mime-Version: 1.0 To: tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov Subject: lengthening days Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Mime-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by mail0.tor.acc.ca id DAA02950 Status: RO Content-Length: 637 Lines: 15

On my local TV news tonight, they said that NASA thinks El Ni=F1o has slowed dow the Earth's rotation, making days 1/10 of a second longer. Surely this can't be right -- if it is, why don't we have three leap seconds a month? At CNN Interactive there is a news story (http://www.cnn.com/TECH/science/9803/26/nasa.el.nino/index.html) quoting the time of rotatin as being "a fraction of a second" longer. But in a transcript of a CNN program (http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/9803/26/ee.07.html) where a NASA oceanographer is interviewed, the interviewer for some reason puts the fraction at 2/3 of a second. What gives? Mathew Englander