We put a man on the daggum moon (allegedly). How is it that we still have to walk around like zombies every Spring because we lost an hour of sleep?
First off, it's "Daylight Saving Time," not "Daylight Savings Time." That "S" is as unnecessary as the concept itself. You're saving daylight, not savings daylight.
Benjamin Franklin wrote a satirical article in 1784 about "saving daylight," but it was more in the spirit of saving money by getting up, and going to bed, earlier to save money on candles and lamp oil, going so far as to suggest taxing shutters and placing guards at wax and tallow shops.
A New Zealand entomologist (insect guy) named George Hudson was taking advantage of his post office job to collect insects, and needed time later on in the day to study and analyze said bugs. In 1895 he earnestly proposed an idea to the Wellington Philosophical Society to shift time two hours forward for the summer and two hours back in the fall. It went over okay. But it was New Zealand, and all...
In 1907 a builder who loved riding horses (pretty much how every online dating bio begins) named William Willet was out early one morning doing what he loved: reader, he was riding a horse when he saw a bunch of closed curtains. It made him mad, as it does. He wrote a pamphlet called "The Waste of Daylight." However, he proposed four 20-minute advances every April, and four 20-minute decreases in September. David Lloyd George loved it. Winston Churchill - then on the Board of Trade - loved it. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle loved it, perhaps because the idea would give him more time to prove fairies existed. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith gave it a hard pass and a bill was narrowly defeated though Willet continued his march to Moar Daylight for Riding Horses until he was successful...in dying of influenza in 1915.
But there were some small, incremental successes in screwing up your body's circadian rhythms. Canadia, for instance. On July 1, 1908 the residents of what is now Thunder Bay, Ontario, where they get an average of 8h 19m of daylight on December 22 (on a clear day), started setting their clocks back an hour - probably to stave off the demons. Back when Thunder Bay - about a six-hour drive north of Minneapolis - was called Port Arthur, a local businessman petitioned the town council to adjust their clocks an hour later in the summer to let kids have a little more Vitamin D so they don't go insane as easily. It passed.
Six years later a town about 320 miles west of Thunder Bay, Kenora (near the Manitoba border), decided it would join in on the daylight-saving fun. Kenora is on the Lake of the Woods. Neighboring town Keewatin is about four miles away, but decided they were just gonna let the clock do what it do, and didn't adjust their clocks once a year. Problem was that a bunch of people lived in one and went to work/school in the other, so for a few months out of the year, towns four miles apart were actually an hour apart. The ferry had to show times in both places. It was confusing and only lasted the one summer.
In 1916, right about halftime in World War I, Germany and Austria decided to also set their clocks forward an hour as a wartime effort to conserve fuel for the war effort. Great Britain followed about two weeks later. It lasted until World War I was over, and didn't make an international appearance again until the sequel came out in 1939.
This time, Great Britain set their clocks forward two hours in what was called Double Summer Time. They tried it again in the late 1960s and saw longer days bring about a reduction in crime, reduction in road casualties, and a savings in fuel of about £35m. But of course, it was deeply unpopular, particularly in Scotland and was done away with in 1971.
And so for the United States, some states decided to move their clocks and some didn't. In a remarkable display of haphazard stupidity, author Michael Downing discovered that:
In 1965 there were 130 cities in the country with populations of 100,000 or more. 59 did not observe daylight saving. Of the 71 that did, there were at least 20 different adoption dates. In Minnesota, St. Paul was on one time, Minneapolis (12.4 miles away) was on a different time, and Duluth was on Wisconsin time. In fact, somebody even found a Minneapolis office building in which the different floors of the building were observing different time zones because they were the offices of different counties.
There were other problems. In 1930 Joseph Stalin unilaterally decided the Soviet Union would spring forward, then forgot to tell everyone to fall back in October. Rather than just do it on their own, Soviets just left things as it was for 61 years when the new Russian government just told everyone to "go to bed as usual" when it was time to fix the clocks. When Yugoslavia's president - Marshal Tito - came to visit the US in 1963. His plane landed in a Virginia town that did its own thing in regards to time as compared to the rest of the state, and no one was there to welcome him. Also in 1963 Pentagon officials were two hours late to a meeting with the Soviet Union in Alaska because no one knew what time it was there.
The Uniform Time Act of 1966 changed that mess. Now, Congress or the Secretary of Transportation can change the time zone boundaries at their leisure. Fun, huh?
Arizona and Hawaii do not currently recognize Daylight Saving Time. But it's worth noting that, without DST, Boston's day would start at 4:06am local time. Seattle's sun would come up at 4:11am; Chicago? 4:14am. New York City at 4:24am, Minneapolis a minute later.
Do I have a solution? haha no. But I sure do like to complain about it without offering one.
