At 2 a.m. Sunday, clocks move forward an hour with the shift from standard time to Daylight Saving Time (DST). You can thank Benjamin Franklin for this.
According to the book, Seize the Daylight, by David Perau, Franklin was living in Paris when he was awakened by sunlight coming in through the windows.
"An accidental sudden noise waked me about 6 in the morning when I was surprised to find my room filled with light," Franklin wrote in a letter to the Journal de Paris, according to Perau. "I imagined at first that a number of lamps had been brought into the room; but rubbing my eyes I perceived the light came in at the windows."
What followed was a plan to save Paris money by optimizing sunlight over candles.
The real father of Daylight Saving Time was an Englishman—William Willett (1857-1915)—a house builder who spent the last eight years of his life petitioning for the adoption of DST by the British Parliament, and did so at his own expense.
Willett produced a pamphlet, The Waste of Daylight. In it he proposed that the clocks should be advanced by 80 minutes in the summer. The evenings would then remain light longer, increasing daylight recreation time and also saving ₤2.5 million in lighting costs. He suggested that the clocks should be advanced by 20 minutes at a time at 2am on successive Sundays in April and be turned back by the same amount on Sundays in September.
Robert Pearce, a member of Parliament, introduced the measure in a select committee of the legislature. A young Winston Churchill heartily endorsed the proposal. Several times the bill came to a vote and each time it met with defeat. Willett died in 1915, of influenza, never living to see his longed-for idea come to fruition.
Ironically, events elsewhere in Europe prompted its eventual adoption. In the summer of 1914, World War I broke out in Europe. Germany and its allies were the first European nations to adopt Willett's proposal. The measure went into effect on April 30, 1916, stemming from the need to conserve coal during wartime. Great Britain, Russia and several neutral European countries came on board in 1917. The United States formally adopted the law in 1918, athough some states and territories have exempted themselves from following Daylight Saving Time.
According to Rasmussen Reports, the majority of Americans simply don't think moving the clock forward or back is "worth the hassle." Results of a survey showed that 47 percent think it's not worthwhile, while 40 percent disagree. The remaining 13 percent aren't sure.
Despite the long-running tradition that began in 1918, 27 percent of people have admitted they have been late or early to an event, thanks to the changing of the clocks. In a related survey, more women than men were aggravated having to change the time.
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—By William Joseph Reynolds and Anthony Karge, originally produced for the Westport, CT, Patch.
