March is two days away, which means that soon some of us will move our clocks forward one hour. If you’re anything like me, you can only remember what to do by saying “spring forward, fall back.” I’m so thankful for that little phrase.
Personally, I join the multitude who prefer falling back. Gaining an hour of sleep is sweeeeet. But on March 8th, we’ll lose an hour of sleep, which is fine this year because March 9th is the first day of SPRING BREAK, and I can sleep in.
Thank the Lord!
There is a slew of arguments over whether or not we need to continue with the daylight saving time tradition. I, for one, don’t like it.
Here are 20 interesting things you may or may not know, about daylight saving time.
1. Though often referred to as daylight savings time (the plural form of “saving”), the correct name is daylight saving time.
2. Ancient civilizations–from Ancient Rome to the Mayans, practiced a close cousin to daylight saving time, adjusting timekeeping with the sun’s behavior. Because their lives depended on agriculture, the ability to predict and measure the sun’s activity was important for day-to-day productivity.
3. American inventor and politician Benjamin Franklin wrote a satirical essay, “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light,” suggesting the idea of daylight saving time. He published the essay in the Journal de Paris in April 1784. The idea was that Parisians could economize candle usage if they rose earlier, taking advantage of the natural morning light. In this same paper, he also included a list of other reforms like “blasting cannons and ringing church bells at dawn to rouse people from their beds.”
4. On October 16, 1895, New Zealand entomologist, George Vernon Hudson, presented the modern-day daylight saving time as a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society in 1895. In it, he proposed a seasonal time adjustment. Due to mounting interest, in 1898 he followed that presentation with a paper.
5. In 1907 British builder, William Willet, published a pamphlet, “The Waste of Daylight”. In 1908, he distributed it to many members of Parliament, town councils, businesses and other organizations. It proposed a plan to advance clocks by 20 minutes in four incremental steps during April, reversing it in September.
6. Interestingly enough, William Willet’s ideas were shouted out of Parliament, BUT seven years later, on April 30, 1916, Germany (their enemy) became the first to put his ideas to use.
7. Germany embraced daylight saving time to conserve electricity. “Weeks later, the United Kingdom followed suit and introduced ‘summer time.’”
8. Frequently believed that daylight saving time was intended to benefit farmers, when first implemented, farmers deeply opposed the time switch; the sun, not the clock, dictated their schedules
9. Implemented on March 21, 1918, in the United States during World War I, the purpose of daylight saving time was to save fuel by reducing the need to use artificial lighting. While some states and communities chose to observe daylight saving time between the wars, it was not observed nationally again until World War II.
10. National daylight saving time was repealed three weeks after World War II ended. Time magazine described the states and localities freedom to start and end daylight saving time whenever they pleased, a “chaos of clocks.”
11. In 1965, Iowa had 23 different pairs of start and end dates for daylight saving time. St. Paul, Minnesota began its daylight saving two weeks before its twin city, Minneapolis. On a 35-mile bus ride from Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, West Virginia, passengers passed through seven time changes. [Source]
12. The Uniform Time Act enacted April 13, 1966, established a standardized system of when daylight saving time started and ended throughout the United States. It did allow individual states to remain on standard time if their local legislatures allowed it.
13. Hawaii and Arizona (except for the state’s Navajo Nation) do not observe daylight saving time.
14. The U.S. Territories of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands remain on standard time year-round.
15. Countries closer to the equator do not observe daylight saving time because they don’t need it; their daylight hours don’t vary much across seasons.
16. “Around the world, only about one-quarter of the world’s population, in approximately 70 countries, observe daylight saving.” [Source] However, in case you think that is a small number of people, it amounts to more than one billion.
17. “Since 1915, the principal supporter of daylight saving in the United States has been the Chamber of Commerce on behalf of small business and retailers…The Chamber understood that if you give workers more sunlight at the end of the day they’ll stop and shop on their way home.” [Source]
18. The March 2013 Rasmussen Report found that only 37 percent of Americans surveyed thought daylight saving time was worth the hassle, which was down from 45% the year before. Also, that 45 percent don’t even think the “clock-changing ritual is worth it.”
19. “In 1984, Fortune magazine estimated that a seven-week extension of DST would yield an additional $30 million for 7-Eleven stores, and the National Golf Foundation estimated the extension would increase golf industry revenues $200 million to $300 million.” [Source]
20. Many of the research stations in Antarctica, where there is no daylight saving time, still observe DST to synchronize with their supply stations in Chile or New Zealand
I am not a fan of daylight saving time. I think I’m with the farmers. I want to rise with the sun and go down the same way. Where are you on daylight saving time?
FYI: Daylight saving time 2015 begins at 2:00 am on Sunday, March 8th and will end at 2:00 am on Sunday, November 1st.
Heather Sanders is a leading homeschooling journalist who desires to inspire families to live, love and learn. Married to Jeff, Heather lives in the East Texas Piney Woods where she currently homeschools three kids using Monarch, an online homeschool curriculum.