DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME is the practice of advancing clocks during summer months so that evening daylight lasts longer, while sacrificing normal sunrise times. It gives us the opportunity to enjoy sunny summer evenings by moving our clocks an hour forward in the spring.
Don’t forget to SPRING FORWARD 1 hour
this Sunday, March 10th at 2 AM
this Sunday, March 10th at 2 AM
PS: Daylight Savings Time ends at 2 AM
Sunday, November 3rd.
Though in
favor of maximizing daylight waking hours, Benjamin Franklin did not originate
the idea of moving clocks forward. By the time he was a 78-year-old
American envoy in Paris in 1784, the man who espoused the virtues of “early to
bed and early to rise” was not practicing what he preached. After being
unpleasantly stirred from sleep at 6 a.m. by the summer sun, the founding
father penned a satirical essay in which he calculated that Parisians, simply
by waking up at dawn, could save the modern-day equivalent of $200 million
through “the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.” As a result of this
essay, Franklin is often erroneously given the honor of “inventing” daylight
saving time, but he only proposed a change in sleep schedules—not the time
itself.
Englishman William Willett led the first campaign to
implement daylight saving time. While on an early-morning horseback
ride around the desolate outskirts of London in 1905, Willett had an epiphany
that the United Kingdom should move its clocks forward by 80 minutes between
April and October so that more people could enjoy the plentiful sunlight. The
Englishman published the 1907 brochure “The Waste of Daylight” and spent much
of his personal fortune evangelizing with missionary zeal for the adoption of
“summer time.” Year after year, however, the British Parliament stymied the
measure, and Willett died in 1915 at age 58 without ever seeing his idea come
to fruition.
Germany was the first country to
enact daylight saving time. It took
World War I for Willett’s dream to come true, but on April 30, 1916, Germany
embraced daylight saving time to conserve electricity.(He may have been
horrified to learn that Britain’s wartime enemy followed his recommendations
before his homeland.) Weeks later, the United Kingdom followed suit and
introduced “summer time.”
Daylight saving time in the
United States was not intended to benefit farmers, as many people think.
Contrary to popular belief, American farmers
did not lobby for daylight saving to have more time to work in the fields; in
fact, the agriculture industry was deeply opposed to the time switch when it was
first implemented on March 31, 1918, as a wartime measure. The sun, not the
clock, dictated farmers’ schedules, so daylight saving was very disruptive.
Farmers had to wait an extra hour for dew to evaporate to harvest hay, hired
hands worked less since they still left at the same time for dinner and cows
weren’t ready to be milked an hour earlier to meet shipping schedules. Agrarian
interests led the fight for the 1919 repeal of national daylight saving time,
which passed after Congress voted to override President Woodrow Wilson’s veto.
Rather than rural interests, it has been urban entities such as retail outlets
and recreational businesses that have championed daylight saving over the
decades.
For decades, daylight saving in
the United States was a confounding patchwork of local practices. After the national repeal in 1919, some states
and cities, including New York City and Chicago, continued to shift their
clocks. National daylight saving time returned during World War II, but after
its repeal three weeks after war’s end the confusing hodgepodge resumed. States
and localities could start and end daylight saving whenever they pleased, a
system that Time magazine (an aptly named source) described in 1963 as “a chaos
of clocks.” In 1965 there were 23 different pairs of start and end dates in
Iowa alone, and St. Paul, Minnesota, even began daylight saving two weeks
before its twin city, Minneapolis. Passengers on a 35-mile bus ride from
Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, West Virginia, passed through seven time
changes. Order finally came in 1966 with the enactment of the Uniform Time Act,
which standardized daylight saving time from the last Sunday in April to the
last Sunday in October, although states had the option of remaining on standard
time year-round.
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