We all hate daylight savings time, right? The “fall back” one isn’t so bad because we get an extra hour of sleep, but we pay for it when we have to “spring forward.” Even my dog was cranky today because we wouldn’t feed her at what she knew to be dinner time, since we were all pretending it was an hour earlier. And Hawaii and Arizona don’t even bother with the time change, though the Navajo Nation lands within Arizona do, which just makes everything even more confusing.
I knew that daylight savings time started in World War I as a way to save fuel (an extra hour of daylight in the evening meant less fuel used to light homes). This was in the US and also in some European countries, many of which also still practice daylight savings today. Only a few cities in Ontario, Canada had experimented with it prior to WWI.
What I didn’t know was that we’ve been getting rid of daylight savings time and bringing it back on and off for the last 100+ years. The first round of daylight saving time ended with WWI. FDR brought it back for WWII and called it “war time.” When WWII ended in 1945, so did war time.
For a while, some parts of the US practiced daylight savings time, while others did not. So, a city might change its clocks while the surrounding countryside stayed on standard time. We can imagine the chaos this would have caused for businesses, travelers, and pretty much everyone.
It was the 1960s when we got saddled with daylight savings time on a more permanent basis to settle the confusion. This was popular with sports equipment manufacturers, who hoped that people would play more sports if they had more daylight hours in the evening, and who continue to lobby for the continuation of daylight savings time. Some workers liked having more daylight time after work to spend outdoors or with their families, but for the most part, it remains unpopular with parents, teachers, farmers (who find that cows don’t adjust their milking schedule to daylight savings time), and pretty much everyone else.
During the energy crisis of the 1970s, the US and many other countries experimented with making daylight savings time permanent in the hopes of saving energy, but that caused problems with workers and school children having to leave home in the dark on winter mornings. Also, though daylight savings time does accrue a very small amount of energy savings in lighting, it may actually cause an increase in fuel use because of people driving more to evening activities. So, we moved back to the clock switching.
The days we spend on standard time are shrinking, though, moving late enough in the fall to allow trick-or-treaters to enjoy the extra hour of daylight and earlier in the spring (perhaps to avoid major religious holidays like Easter?). Maybe we’re heading toward doing away with it once more – this time for good.
Photo courtesy of maxmann
Quill Pen and Blotter 