Time Machine : Sunrise Clock Doesn’t Need to Be Reset Twice a Year

Tired of spending time resetting clocks and watches twice a year for Daylight Saving Time, which starts at 2 a.m. Sunday?

Then give Daniel Marvosh a minute to tell you about the clock system he has invented that automatically compensates for long winter nights and long summer days.

His “sunrise clock” adds a few seconds a day for half the year and subtracts a few seconds the other half. If the world adopted his way of telling time, he says, everyone’s life would be brighter.

“Think of the energy savings,” Marvosh said. “Think of the time saved by not having to reset clocks twice a year.”

Think of the audacity of an 82-year-old Pasadena man daring to challenge the concept of time that has been shaped over the centuries by the likes of Aristotle, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

Actually, Marvosh says, time is tampered with all the time. Daylight Saving Time was extended a month in 1987 after the back-yard barbecue industry lobbied Congress for more time for evening cookouts.

Marvosh designed his clock when he retired as owner of an El Monte mechanical engineering business in 1972 and found that he had time on his hands.

“I was lying in bed about 4:30 one summer morning and I could hear birds chirping and bees humming outside. I asked myself, ‘Why am I wasting all this daylight?’ Here it was light outside, but I was supposed to sleep another two hours.”

Marvosh studied sunrise tables printed in the newspaper and concluded that it would be easy to make dawn come at roughly the same time every day.

All you needed to do was add a minute a day between Dec. 21 and June 21 and subtract a minute each day from June 21 and Dec. 21. Those dates are the winter and summer solstices--the shortest and longest days of the year.

But how could you get clocks to cooperate?

Marvosh realized that power companies could automatically adjust electric-powered clocks by slightly reducing generators’ normal 60-cycle alternating current frequency in the spring and increasing it in the fall. Such fluctuations would have no effect on computers or other electrical devices, he said.

Controlling battery-operated clocks was a more difficult challenge.

Marvosh went to work in the shop behind the Clarmeya Lane home he built by hand in 1948--the place he saved 1 1/2 years ago by climbing onto the roof with lawn sprinklers at the height of the wind-whipped Eaton Canyon brush fire.

He designed a clock controlled by two quartz crystals--one causing the clock motor to run slow enough to add a minute a day and the other subtracting a minute by speeding up the motor.

He commissioned a few dual-crystal clock motors from a Torrance company and assembled them in a plastic housing equipped with a switch that changes crystals each Dec. 21 and June 21. He has distributed his prototype clocks to friends.

“It’s a beautiful idea. It makes so much sense,” said Robert Eichholz, an electrical engineer from Tucson who received a clock after meeting Marvosh through his brother-in-law.

Marvosh has tried to promote his time system to various federal and state officials, including all 50 governors. About a third have replied--many advising that they have forwarded his proposal to their departments of agriculture, energy or transportation.

But others warn of the difficulty of changing something as familiar as the Earth’s international system of measuring time, created 111 years ago.

“Sounds like you have a fairly large goal ahead of you,” said Farrell West, operations chief for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation at Hoover Dam.

William W. Brown, executive vice president of the Idaho Farm Bureau Federation, wrote that the concept “has substantial merit,” but “I question our ability to generate enough support to accomplish the change.”

Marvosh, meantime, runs his life on sunrise clock time--arising daily at dawn (that was 5:41 a.m. today to you and me, 4:04 a.m. to the sunrise clock).

But his wife of 56 years, Mildred, and daughter Danica rely on standard time. They “pretty much have to: The TV programs are on standard time,” he said.

Marvosh knows that it will take time to sell his concept to broadcasters and the rest of the world.

“The government is so slow to change anything,” he said. “When the public finds out what this is, then government will respond. But who knows if I’ll live that long.”

Marvosh sure would like to see his time system come before his time comes.