Daylight time first implemented by Germans
Published 7:00 pm Monday, November 6, 2017
For those readers wondering whence came daylight saving time, The Informer today reruns a question and answer from 2015:
Who, when and why was daylight saving time started?
Benjamin Franklin — think “early to bed, early to rise” — in a satirical letter to Journal de Paris in 1784 urged Parisians to awake at daybreak rather than an appointed hour as a way to curb their spending on candles.
“I believe all who have common sense, as soon as they have learnt from this paper that it is daylight when the sun rises, will contrive to rise with him,” Franklin wrote.
To compel people to rise early, he said, the authorities could levy a tax for each window fitted with shutters; ration candles; limit nighttime coach traffic, “except those of physicians, surgeons, and midwives”; and ring the church bells — and perhaps fire cannons — at sunrise.
“All the difficulty will be in the first two or three days; after which the reformation will be as natural and easy as the present irregularity …,” Franklin wrote.
“Oblige a man to rise at four in the morning, and it is more than probable he will go willingly to bed at eight in the evening; and, having had eight hours sleep, he will rise more willingly at four in the morning following.”
The first person to propose advancing the hands on clocks was British builder William Willet, who in 1907 suggested Britons turn their clocks ahead by 20 or 30 minutes on successive Sundays to take advantage of the longer days.
“This is the whole cost of the scheme. We lose nothing, and gain substantially …,” Willet wrote in a pamphlet titled “The Waste of Daylight.”
“Everything will go on just as it does now, except that as the later hours of the day come round, they will bring more light with them. Those who have travelled by sea east or west, will remember how easily they accommodated themselves to the frequent alterations of time on board ship.
“They simply adjusted their watches, attended to the engagements of the day in correspondence therewith, and quickly dismissed from their minds all recollection of the alterations which had been made. If this can take place at sea day after day for several weeks without discomfort, may not a similar operation be possible on land?”
The British government declined to adopt the plan, and Willet died in 1915. A year later the German government, hoping to save on energy costs during World War I, implemented a daylight saving scheme. The British, seeking a similar advantage, adopted it a few weeks later.
The United States adopted daylight saving time in 1918, but repealed it a year later, leaving the issue for local authorities to implement if they wished.
The U.S. again adopted it during World War II; daylight time was observed nationwide from February 1942 through September 1945. It was implemented again in the 1960s, with local exceptions, and has been altered slightly in the intervening years.
Saving energy and seizing the day have long been the primary goals of daylight saving time.
But studies have reached different conclusions on whether daylight time achieves the former — some say yes, others say no. And surveys have revealed a similar divide on the question of whether the latter is worth losing an hour’s sleep.
