Daylight Savings Time Explained: What's It All About?

Daylight Savings Time ended last night, with clocks going back one hour. That means that today, if you woke up at ten it's actually nine - so congratulations, you've got an extra hour to your day! But where did this tradition begin? Latin Times unpacks the Daylight Savings mystery. The idea of daylight savings can be traced back to ancient times when time was measured entirely in relation to the sun. Although these clocks were less accurate, they were more flexible and kept in time with the movement of the sun over the course of the year. Benjamin Franklin might have been the first to bring the idea forward when he mockingly suggested that the French get up earlier to save money on candles while he was an envoy in France.

Daylight Savings Time as a concept wasn't officially introduced until 1895 when New Zealander George Vernon Hudson presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-savng shift, which would allow Hudson, who was an entomologist, more daylight hours to collect insect specimens. Englishmen WIlliam Willet independently conceived of a similar idea in 1905 when he saw how many people slept late in summer and missed out on daylight hours. His proposal was taken up by Robert Pearce, a Liberal Member of Parliament, who introduced the Daylight Saving Bill to the House of Commons on February 12 1908. However, the bill did not become law. It was actually Germany and Austria-Hungary who were the first to use DST as a way to conserve coal during wartime: Britain and most of Europe soon followed, and the United States officially adopted it in 1918.

Daylight Savings Time was repealed after the end of the war, but returned during the Second World War. However, it wasn't widely and officially adopted until the 1970s as a result of the 1970s energy crisis, when many industrialized Western countries faced petroleum shortages and elevated prices. DST was seen as a way to save electricity across Europe and North America. US Congress officially instituted the policy in 1975. In 1986 Congress enacted P.L. 99-359, amending the Uniform Time Act by changing the beginning of DST to the first Sunday in April and having the end remain the last Sunday in October. In 2006, this was changed again. Starting in 2007, clocks were set ahead one hour on the second Sunday of March (March 11, 2007) and set back one hour on the first Sunday in November (November 4, 2007). Clocks are now changed across the country back an hour at 2:00 AM first Sunday in November.