We’ve all heard the stories that Daylight Savings Time (DST) is about either farmers or school children. And actually neither of those are true. Farmers hated it at first. The school children walking to school in the dark weren’t really mentioned until the 1970s.
Whether you love it or feel personally victimized by it every year, it’s here to stay.
The first mention of the idea was actually a joke written to a Paris newspaper in 1784 by Benjamin Franklin. He said that Parisians could save $200 million (in today’s money) on candles if they’d get up an hour earlier. Nothing came of it and it didn’t catch on.
In 1916 there was a WWI effort to conserve fuel which brought the idea into existence in Germany. The rest of Europe followed Germany’s lead. It didn’t start in the US until two years later and it was a very unpopular idea, especially with farmers because they had less time in the morning on their chores.
Use of DST at that time until around 1966 was not uniform in the US with only some states and cities adopting the idea.
From 1966 to 1972 there were many iterations of DST and this is the time period in which the federal standard came into being. During this time the dates of when DST happened changed several times.
The oil embargo in 1973 caused yet another instance of needing to preserve fuel. During this time Congress enacted a trial period where DST was observed for an entire year. The idea was hotly debated in court, but the US ended up going back to using DST for the spring and summer months.
In 1986 Congress added weeks to DST and did so again in 2007. Currently, we are in DST for about 65% of the year.
There is a movement by many states to either make DST permanent or end it all together, but nothing has been done about it nationally by Congress. The only states that do not observe DST are Arizona and Hawaii.
So, love it or hate it, don’t forget to set your clocks one hour ahead on Saturday night so you’ll be on time Sunday morning. —K.W.C.
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