Don’t Forget DST Tonight!

Got this lovely email from my better half explaining tonight’s spring ahead! (He does a much better job with this than I did last year!)

Don't forget to set your clocks ahead one hour at 2 a.m. Sunday morning as we enter Daylight Savings.

American inventor and politician Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay called "An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light" to the editor of The Journal of Paris in 1784. In the essay, he suggested, although jokingly, that Parisians could economize candle usage by getting people out of bed earlier in the morning, making use of the natural morning light instead.

A major contributor to the invention of DST was New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson. In 1895, Hudson presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour shift forward in October and a two-hour shift back in March.

Germany was the first country to implement DST. Clocks there were first turned forward at 11:00 p.m. (23:00) on April 30, 1916. In the U.S., Daylight Saving Time - or "fast time", as it was called then was first introduced in 1918 when President Woodrow Wilson signed it into law to support the war effort during World War I. The initiative was sparked by Robert Garland, a Pittsburgh industrialist who had encountered the idea in the United Kingdom. A passionate campaigner for the use of DST in the United States, he is often called the "father of Daylight Saving". In the United States, DST caused widespread confusion from 1945 to 1966 for trains, buses and the broadcasting industry because states and localities were free to choose when and if they would observe DST. Congress decided to end the confusion and establish the Uniform Time Act of 1966 that stated DST would begin on the last Sunday of April and end on the last Sunday of October. However, states still had the ability to be exempt from DST by passing a local ordinance. The U.S. Congress extended DST to a period of ten months in 1974 and eight months in 1975, in hopes to save energy following the 1973 oil embargo. The trial period showed that DST saved the energy equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil each day, but DST still proved to be controversial. Many complained that the dark winter mornings endangered the lives of children going to school. After the energy crisis was over in 1976, the U.S. changed their DST schedule again to begin on the last Sunday in April. DST was amended again to begin on the first Sunday in April in 1987. Further changes were made after the introduction of the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Daylight Saving Time (sometimes called Daylight Savings Time) is now in use in over 70 countries worldwide and affects over a billion people every year.

And now you know the rest of the story.....