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Daylight Savings Time
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DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME

The current March-November system the US follows began in 2007, but the concept of “saving daylight” is much older. It’s debated who originally came up with the idea, but Benjamin Franklin appeared to have first mentioned it in 1784, when he wrote a letter to the editor of the Journal of Paris.

DST wasn’t widely used until more than a century later, though. Several countries, including Britain and Germany, implemented DST during World War I. The practice aimed to cut artificial lighting use so troops could conserve fuel for the war. But the US didn’t standardize the system until 1966, when it passed the Uniform Time Act.
DATABASES
The current March-November system the US follows began in 2007, but the concept of “saving daylight” is much older. It’s debated who originally came up with the idea, but Benjamin Franklin appeared to have first mentioned it in 1784, when he wrote a letter to the editor of the Journal of Paris. DST wasn’t widely used until more than a century later, though. Several countries, including Britain and Germany, implemented DST during World War I. The practice aimed to cut artificial lighting use so troops could conserve fuel for the war. But the US didn’t standardize the system until 1966, when it passed the Uniform Time Act.
Daylight saving time (DST), also known as daylight savings time or daylight time (United States, Canada and Australia), and summer time (United Kingdom, European Union, and some others), is the practice of advancing clocks (typically by one hour) during warmer months so that darkness falls at a later clock time. The typical implementation of DST is to set clocks forward by one hour in the spring ("spring forward") and set clocks back by one hour in autumn ("fall back") to return to standard time. As a result, there is one 23-hour day in late winter or early spring and one 25-hour day in the autumn. The idea of aligning waking hours to daylight hours to conserve candles was first proposed in 1784 by American Benjamin Franklin. In a satirical letter to the editor of The Journal of Paris, the American inventor suggested that waking up earlier in the summer would economize candle usage and calculated considerable savings.[1][2] In 1895, New Zealand entomologist and astronomer George Hudson seriously proposed the idea of changing clocks by two hours every spring to the Wellington Philosophical Society. He wanted to have more daylight hours to devote to collecting and examining insects. Though the idea received some serious consideration in 1907 in the United Kingdom when British resident William Willett presented it as a way to save energy, it was never implemented. Starting on April 30, 1916, the German Empire and Austria-Hungary each organized the first nationwide implementation in their jurisdictions.
It was during World War I that daylight saving time was first practically used. In 1916, locations within the German Empire set clocks ahead one hour in an effort to use less power for lighting and to save fuel for the war effort. Many other countries soon followed and after the war ended, they all went back to standard time.
Although modern DST has only been used for about 100 years, ancient civilizations are known to have engaged in comparable practices thousands of years ago. For example, the Roman water clocks used different scales for different months of the year to adjust the daily schedules to the solar time.
Hawaii and Arizona—with the exception of the state’s Navajo Nation—do not observe daylight saving time, and the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands also remain on standard time year-round. Some Amish communities also choose not to participate in daylight saving time. (Around the world, only about one-quarter of the world’s population, in approximately 70 countries, observe daylight saving. Since their daylight hours don’t vary much from season to season, countries closer to the equator have little need to deviate from standard time.)
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