This weekend we will religiously change all our clocks back one hour, except for those that are digital like cell phones. At our house we have a number of clocks with pendulums that must be wound every eight days. I also have a husband that believes if he set the alarm twenty or thirty minutes ahead, I will not notice the difference and get up or get ready earlier. I learned that trick long ago and now know to calculate the difference. My husband is in charge of clocks.
So, who was this brilliant fellow who created or began the time change issue? None other than Benjamin Franklin. Late in life he served as the American envoy in Paris, France in 1784. Even though he encouraged everyone that “early to bed and early to rise” was an absolute necessity, Franklin was unpleasantly stirred from sleep at 6:00 by summer sun. To kindly suggest this was ludicrous, he wrote a satirical essay in which he calculated that in today’s money, the Parisians could save the equivalent of $200 million by getting up earlier and retiring earlier without using so much candle power.
Franklin did not propose daylight saving time, he merely proposed a change in sleep habits. Of which, the good citizens completely ignored.
In 1905 William Willett of Great Britain proposed an 80-minute forward of clocks so the good people of that island kingdom would have plentiful sunlight half the year. For the next ten years, Willett continued to push the idea with no avail.
In 1916 the Germans decided that the idea as a brilliant way to conserve electricity. Shortly thereafter, Great Britain followed. Americans implemented what was known as “summer time” while serving in World War I.
Many people believe the Americanization of daylight-saving time was to benefit farmers and ranchers. Wrong! The change threw off the schedule of harvesting due to dew on the grass, milking cows and other minute ways. In 1919 American agrarians led the fight to repeal national daylight-saving time. Urbanites, recreationalists, retail owners and industries have supported the issue, though.
National daylight-saving time reappeared during World War II, cows or no cows. But three weeks after the war ended, the confusing hodgepodge reappeared. States and localities began to set their own times; in Iowa there were 23 different pairs of start and end dates alone.
Finally, in 1966 the Uniform Time Act was enacted. Congress set times and dates for changes. However, there were exceptions. Hawaii, Arizona, and American Territories do not comply. The Navajo Nation in Arizona does, though. Only about 70 countries around the world participate.
University of California Santa Barbara economists calculated daylight-savings time led to a 1-percent rise in residential electricity through the additional demand for air-conditioning as well as increased gasoline consumption. Maybe Old Ben was right, let’s just turn over and go back to sleep.