It is that time of year again when everyone gets an extra hour of sleep, and the sun suddenly goes down on your drive home from work. But why, exactly, do we do this?
To wonder about “Daylight Savings Time” you first have to consider where standard time came from in the first place.
Railroad time
In the US, we have the railroads to thank for what we now consider “standard” time. Prior to 1883, there were over a hundred “local” times across the United States. Since travel from place to place took days, it didn’t really matter if you gained or lost 10 or 15 minutes over the course of the trip. As railroads became more popular and expanded it became a bit of a problem since trip times were drastically cut down. It was possible at times to arrive at your destination earlier than you left.
After a decade of trying to solve the problem, a solution was finally reached. On November 18, 1883, all railroads coordinated to set their clocks to the same time. They used four separate time zones across the United States that looked a bit like ours today but not quite as organized. They used state lines more as the boundary versus what we see today.
This standard time was based off the Greenwich Median, which wasn’t accepted by the entire world as of yet. That would change after a special international session of Congress held in 1884 and Greenwich Median Time was officially worldwide.
Second go at time zones
The time zones as we know and love them today came much later. The first federally mandated time zones were adopted in 1918 at the beginning of World War 1. As transportation by car and train were both extremely widespread by this point, the Interstate Commerce Commission was given the authority to designate standard time for the country. They were a bit less wonky than the 1883 map but still considerably different than what we have today.
The current time zones have been in place since 2007, with only a few counties in Illinois changing since then.
First “daylight saving”
The United States was actually not the first country to establish Daylight Saving Time. Germany did it in 1916 to conserve coal. The US was right behind as World War 1 began, and “war time”, as it was referred to then, was federally established in the Standard Time Act in 1918. Congress repealed it one year later, and it was then left up to states to decide.
War Time was brought back in 1942 as World War II began. It was in effect year-round until the war ended in 1945.
In 1966, the Uniform Time Act established both modern Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and the modern version of Daylight Saving Time. This first version had clocks changing on the last Sunday in April and the last Sunday in October.
Ronald Reagan moved the start to the first Sunday of April in 1986. In 2007, it was finally agreed to start on the second Sunday in March and end on the first Sunday of November.
But, why?
Whether we needed Daylight Saving Time in the 1960s, and especially today, is widely debated. Some people favor it since it gives us later sunsets during the summer, and many are also opposed because it seems pointless.
Initially, the idea was to conserve energy. During World War I and II, if the sun went down one hour later in the evening, it was believed you would use less energy since you wouldn’t turn the lights or heat on until later in the day. Since people generally spend more time at home after work than before, the morning increase wasn’t considered a problem. Since then, the Department of Energy has done studies showing this doesn’t work.
Thus, today, it has less to do with energy and more to do with people’s schedules.
Moving an hour of daylight from morning to evening gives people a chance to spend more time outside after work. It also gives outdoor businesses a chance to do more business before it gets dark in the warmer months. A 9 p.m. sunset is much easier to enjoy than a 5 a.m. sunrise.
So when you roll your clocks back tonight for that extra hour of sleep, I hope you have a better understanding of time and where this weird thing we do with our clocks comes from!
