![]() ![]() With that in mind, he proposed two yearly time changing phases - one in April, and one in September. Willett was an early riser and avid golfer, and so he had a fixation on what time the sun rose and set. ![]() If you need a single name, British residential real estate developer William Willett who wrote the 1907 pamphlet "The Waste of Daylight," was probably the inventor of DST - or as he called it "British Summer Time."Ī New Zealand entomologist named George Hudson had quietly proposed a similar idea a few years earlier in 1895, but Willett was a wealthy businessman who was eventually able to have his idea transformed into a formal parliamentary proposal in the UK, so I’ll grant him the credit over Hudson because his plan got results, but feel free to disagree with me. SEE ALSO: Daylight saving time could become permanent in the U.S. In spirit, this is similar to the goals of Daylight Saving Time, but Franklin did not propose that everyone should change their clocks twice a year. In the letter, Franklin crunches some numbers, and concludes that governments should use tax incentives to try and induce their people to be awake whenever the sun is shining, largely in order to save money on candles. and discovering that - Surprise! - the sun had been shining early in the morning all along, and he’d been missing it by snoozing until noon. ![]() He wrote a humorous letter to the editor of The Journal of Paris in 1784 about accidentally waking up at 6 a.m. The popular idea that Benjamin Franklin invented Daylight Saving Time is half-true. Why do we do Daylight Saving Time? What does it mean? It’s reasonable to have questions: Why is something so weird considered normal? How does it work? Do we really have to do it? Will it ever stop?Īnd here are the answers. It interrupts our lives in ways that are somewhat obscure precisely because they’re the norm. And more consequential effects - for better or worse - may be involved as well (more on which in a minute).Ĭhanging the clocks is an all-out attack on our perception of time as an immutable law of nature. Babies and dogs demand that their old sleep and feeding habits remain unchanged. What feels like an abrupt and drastic lengthening or shortening of the day causes time itself to seem fictional. Mild chaos ensues at both annual clock changes. Our clocks set themselves back an hour, and we wake up refreshed, if a little uneasy. We wake up bleary-eyed and confused until we remember what just happened.Īfterward, "Daylight Saving Time" becomes the norm for about eight months (And yes, it's called "Daylight Saving" not "Daylight Savings." I don't make the rules). The clocks on our smartphones do something bizarre twice a year: One day in the spring, they jump ahead an hour, and our alarms go off an hour sooner. A man in bed looks irritated and confused about what his clock is telling him ![]()
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