Does anybody really know what time it is? Did you remember to “spring ahead” for Daylight Savings Time?
Yawn. We all missed an hour of sleep Saturday night, and we don’t get to reclaim it until November. We’ll complain a little. We’ll be a little less productive at work Monday, claiming fatigue.
But Daylight Savings Time is easier than an alternative proposed by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin is sometimes credited as “inventing” Daylight Savings Time (DST). He didn’t. He did, though, while serving as American envoy in France, suggest that Parisians could save money on candles if they got out of bed earlier in the morning and took better advantage of daylight. He anonymously published a satire in 1784 suggesting that candles should be taxed and Parisians should be awakened at sunrise by church bells and cannons. Get work done earlier in the day, and then be ready for bed when it got dark instead of burning candles, he suggested.
Other proponents of DST were probably viewed as eccentric crackpots by some. An entomologist in New Zealand, George Vernon Hudson, is credited (or blamed, depending on a person’s viewpoint) with inventing modern DST. He worked an hourly job and valued his evening hours to collect insects. He wrote a pair of papers proposing a two-hour change, one in 1895 and one in 1898. Setting clocks to start a work day when the sun was still in the east would leave more daylight for catching bugs after the work day.
Others credit the prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett who, as the story goes, was dismayed during a breakfast ride in 1905 to see how many Londoners slept through a large part of the summer’s day. Willett also enjoyed golf, and he wanted more time to golf in the evening. Moving all commerce to earlier in the day would stretch time available on the links. The House of Commons took up a bill suggesting that in 1908, but nothing happened. Willett continued lobbying for the time change until he died in 1915.
Finally, a war did what a bug catcher and a golfer couldn’t do. In 1916, Germany and its World War I allies were the first to use DST, not for bug catching or golf, but to conserve coal. Britain and its allies followed suit. The United States first adopted DST in 1918.
DST was not used continuously in the States until the 1970s energy crisis. The dates for DST were not consistent at first. From 1987 through 2006, Congress set DST as the first Sunday in April through the last Sunday in October. That time was stretched by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, and enacted in 2007. DST now is in effect from the second Sunday in March through the first Sunday in November. An extra bit of daylight is probably welcome for trick-or-treaters before we “fall back” and reclaim 60 minutes of snoozing.
