historyWikipedia1895–1907 · New Zealand, England
Benjamin Franklin never proposed daylight saving time, despite the popular myth that he did
Daylight saving time was first proposed by New Zealand entomologist George Hudson in 1895, a shift worker who wanted evening daylight to collect insects. Englishman William Willett independently conceived it in 1907 after noticing Londoners sleeping through summer mornings, and he lobbied for it until his death in 1915. Port Arthur and Fort William in Ontario were the first cities to adopt it, in May 1908. Germany and Austria-Hungary became the first nations to adopt it nationally in 1916, to save coal during the First World War. Franklin's famous 1784 letter was actually a satire about economising on candles.
DST keeps the same time zone but moves clocks forward an hour in summer, so evening daylight lasts an hour longer on the clock. Its appeal depends on people's waking hours matching the sun less than the clock does. Because railways and telegraphs needed standardised clocks, shifting them became practical in a way it was not in Franklin's era.
Clock changes began as a wartime energy measure and became a standard fixture across much of the world. The US briefly tried permanent daylight saving time in 1974 but repealed it within a year after complaints about children walking to school in the dark. Several Canadian provinces have recently moved to permanent DST, as the source notes.
Seasonal adjustments to time are very old: the Romans and medieval monks used hours that changed length across the year, and equal civil hours replaced them from the 14th century. DST is one such change, adopted in wartime and revisited many times since, with repeals and new enactments in the US and Canada.
Before standard clock time, the Romans used water clocks whose hour lengths changed with the season, so an hour in summer was longer than one in winter.
Adapted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
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