In 1849, the New York Herald reported on the arrest of a gentleman by the name of William Thompson.

I use the term ‘gentleman’ here broadly. As the Herald reported:

For the last few months a man has been traveling about the city…he would go up to a perfect stranger in the street, and being a man of genteel appearance, would easily command an interview. Upon this interview he would say after some little conversation, “have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until to-morrow;” the stranger at this novel request, supposing him to be some old acquaintance not at that moment recollected, allows him to take the watch, thus placing “confidence” in the honesty of the stranger, who walks off laughing and the other supposing it to be a joke allows him so to do. In this way many have been duped…

To those who had heard of these strange interactions, Thompson was known as the “Confidence Man.”

He was, in fact, the first “confidence man” – a term which has sense been colloquially shortened to “con man.”

I’m watching the sun set, shortly after 4pm on a Monday afternoon.

Winter is all downhill from here.

Officially, we are now back on Standard Time, but the luxuriously long days of summer make the idea of “daylight saving” seem trivial. In Boston, the 2015 Summer solstice enjoyed 15 hours and 17 minutes of daylight. Our Winter solstice will see just 9 hours and 4 minutes of natural light.

No amount of adjusting the time will create more sunlight in a day.

So why do we do this terrible dance from Standard time to Daylight Savings, and tragically back to Standard?

In April 1916, residents of the German Empire were the first to turn their clocks back – this “summer time” schedule was intended to conserve energy for the war effort. (Interestingly, Berlin’s Summer solstice sees nearly 17 hours of daylight!).

The idea was presumably effective, as it was adopted by other European countries shortly thereafter. (Though there are some indications that the move wasn’t entirely popular outside the major cities.)

In 1918, the U.S. Congress passed the Standard Time Act, an “An Act to save daylight and to provide standard time, for the United States.”

Summer time was generally discontinued after the war.

Daylight Savings was so unpopular in the United States that Congress overrode a Presidential veto and repealed its implementation effective the last Sunday of October, 1919.

In 1942, Congress implemented “war time,” which established that “the standard time of each zone…shall be advanced one hour [until] 6 months after the termination of the present war.”

After the war, many cities and states kept the adjusted time for summer months. While others dropped the adjusted time all together. As Wikipedia comments, “In the 1964 Official Railway Guide, 21 of the 48 states had no DST anywhere.”

In 1966, things began to change. The Uniform Time Act was the first to set national dates for transitioning to and from Daylight Savings Time. It encouraged states to participate in the time change, though states did have the right to opt-out.

Interestingly, the Act transferred management of the time change from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the Department of Transportation.

The specific times and dates of change have been adjusted a few times since then, but it’s that 1966 Act which really established Daylight Savings Time as we know it.

I’m rather enjoying being back to daily commutes downtown. It’s been particularly interesting being primarily on the Green Line – having previously commuted primarily by Red.

The Redline is perhaps the most polished of the MBTA lines. It is certainly the youngest. The section of track from Park Street to Harvard was opened in 1912. Followed by the later extension to Porter, Davis, and Alewife as recently as the early ’80s.

The Green Line, on the other hand, is the MBTA’s oldest line – making it the single oldest public transit line in the United States. While the Lechmere terminus – where I now board the train – wasn’t opened until 1922 – much of the tunnel work was initially done in the late 1890s.

So every time the train squeals while going through one of those sharp turns I think of it as a little bit of history.

Perhaps even more interesting about the Green Line tunnels, though, is that there are places where you can actually see good portions of the track. With the current re-construction of Government Center station, there’s a whole section that’s well lit and open for viewing. It’s fascinating.

The MBTA boldly claims to have ” a history longer than that of American independence,” dating the city’s history of public transportation back to the family-operated ferries of 1631.

Public transit as we know it, though, really started to emerge in the mid-1800s. While initially stage coaches carried passengers between Boston and surrounding cities, in the 1820s “omnibus” (OMNI – a bus for all, everywhere) service emerged. “Longer than a conventional stagecoach, it had lengthwise seats along either side rather than cross seats, and a door at either end. Stagecoaches went directly from one city or town; omnibuses made several stops along an assigned route.” The OMNIs were, of course, still horse-drawn.

Around the sometime, street railways – horse drawn cars on tracks – began to appear in concert with the nation’s railroad boom. As one historian notes, these street railways “were not envisioned purely to provide transportation within the city, a need as yet not pressing or obvious in the small, compact cities of that day.”

By the 1850s, there were horse-drawn street cars throughout Boston and nearby cities, with service that competed with, and sometimes duplicated, that of the OMNIs. In 1887 the state consolidated all lines into the West End Street Railway, which then oversaw the expansion of the system and the introduction of electrified street cars.

Eventually, the streets became so crowded with street cars that the “Tremont Street Subway” – now the Green Line – was conceived to alleviate traffic in the city’s busiest disctricts.