Who Invented Daylight Savings Time?

All your life you’ve been a slave to the springing forward and the falling back of the clock, and now you want answers; you want to know who invented Daylight Savings Time. The concept of Daylight Savings Time has been around since the 1780s, but the United States was one of the last countries to figure it out. In fact, the most recent DST-related legislation just went into effect in 2007.

In 1784, while he was serving as the American ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay entitled “An Economical Project.” In this satirical essay, Franklin claims to have discovered that the sun “gives light as soon as he rises.” He says that the people of Paris are intelligent and economical people, and he cannot imagine that they would still be using so much candlelight at night if they knew they could get sunlight in the morning for free.

It was all a big joke at the time, but it was also the basis for the practice of Daylight Savings Time, proposed by George Vernon Hudson in an 1895 paper. Hudson was a jack of many trades; he worked as Chief Clerk of a New Zealand post office, he was an astronomer, and he was a famed entomologist. Because of his many jobs and hobbies, Hudson appreciated days when daylight hours extended past the time when he left work – hours he could use to find and observe insects outdoors. In the 1895 paper he presented to the Wellington Philosophical Society, Hudson proposed two-hour time shift that would extend daylight hours later into the evening.

It was not until a few years later, however, that anyone took the idea seriously. In 1907, British builder William Willett published “The Waste of Daylight,” a pamphlet proposing that the time be shifted forward 20 minutes on each of four Sundays in April, and then shifted back 20 minutes at a time over the course of four Sundays in September. Willett’s argument was that more work could be done, and less energy could be used to produce artificial light by which to do the work. This was essentially the same argument made by Franklin over 100 years earlier.

Willett promoted the idea tirelessly, gaining some support in Parliament, but never enough during his lifetime to see it passed into law. He died in 1915, and the bill passed the next year, following the lead of Germany and Austria. Most of Europe, parts of Canada, and Australia adopted DST after that, and the U.S. made her first attempts at the practice starting in 1918.

In the U.S.

By 1918, all of the 48 contiguous states had been adopted into the Union. Setting up a system of standardized time was hard for a large nation. Adopting a practice of Daylight Savings Time was even harder. It took almost 90 years to get it all straightened out.

• On March 19, 1918, the U.S. put into effect an act “to preserve daylight and provide standard time for the United States.” This plan established standard time zones across the country and set Daylight Savings Time to begin on March 31, 1918 and run for seven months. The process was repeated in 1919.
• After World War I ended, the law was repealed due to its being incredibly unpopular. Only some states and major cities continued to use DST.
• During WWII, President Roosevelt put DST into effect year-round to save money. He called it “War Time.”
• From the end of WWII to 1966, there was no federal regulation on DST, and it was left up to local municipalities to decide whether they wanted to keep it or not. This became very confusing with different cities and states practicing DST or not, beginning and ending it at different times. The broadcast and transportation industries were particularly affected.
• In 1966, Congress passed The Uniform Time Act, which stated that DST would begin on the last Sunday of April and end on the last Sunday of October. Individual states could still be exempt from DST by passing a state law to that effect.
• Congress revised the law in 1972 for states that fell into two or more time zones, providing that they could exempt part of the state from DST while allowing the part of the state in a different time zone to observe DST.
• In 1986, the law was once again amended, moving the beginning of DST to the first Sunday in April.
• The Energy Policy Act of 2005 once again changed DST, this time extending it until the first Sunday in November.

The rationale behind the most recent change to DST is threefold. It provides longer daylight hours to make trick-or-treating safer on Halloween, it reduces the risk of crime and automobile accidents, and some hope more voters will be drawn to the polls if it’s still light out when they leave work. Of course, it also still saves tons of energy, and for that you can thank George Vernon Hudson, who invented Daylight Savings Time, or William Willett, who fought for it.