In just a few hours, Daylight Saving Time is back — I like DST with the longer days, just seems like I get more done.Most everyone knows that daylight saving was proposed by Benjamin Franklin, but not everyone knows that he proposed it as a joke. Franklin wrote a satirical letter, in 1784, to the editor of the Journal of Paris outlining how many pounds of candle wax the city would save (64,050,000 pounds, according to his calculations) if its clocks were better aligned with the rising and setting of the sun.
It was more than a century after Ben’s letter that a British builder named William Willet became a champion of daylight saving, and lobbied Parliament to adjust the time in April and September in order to take full advantage of the day’s light. Germany and several other European countries had already mandated DST as a way of reducing energy and saving coal for the war effort. Recently, several studies have questioned this line of thinking and there is some data indicating that DST probably doesn’t really save that much energy.
After World War II, the US repealed the national law requiring states to institute daylight saving. Some towns decided to stick with it — some didn’t. This ultimately led to chaos. One 35-mile bus ride from Mounsville, West Virginia to Steubenville, Ohio, took its riders through seven different time changes. In 1966, the Uniform Time Act standardized DST, but the federal government has no law requiring states to observe DST — Hawaii and Arizona have chosen not to implement the time change.
I’ve often wondered why daylight saving time didn’t occur at midnight — that certainly seems more logical than waiting two more hours until two in the morning. Apparently there’s no really good explanation, at least not to me. The two in the morning time appears to have been chosen because most people aren’t awake to notice it — most workers with early shifts will still be in bed and most bars and restaurants will already be closed.
We have twin granddaughters and it never occurred to me until recently that if they had been born around the time of the clock change it might complicate things, especially discussions as to who came first…. If one twin is born right before the hour of 2 a.m., then the second twin is born after the clocks roll back — which one is older. I’m sure this has happened more than once, but my extensive research found an instance when twin brothers were born in Massachusetts on November 6, 2016, right at the weirdest possible time. Samuel was born first, at 1:39 a.m.; his brother Ronan arrived about 30 minutes later, at what should have 2:10 a.m. But because of DST, it was only 1:10 a.m. — paperwork-wise, that made Ronan appear to be “older.” I imagine this contributed a bit to their sibling rivalry. Anyhow, it’s good to have the longer days back — long live DST.
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