Daylight Savings Time Today: Not in the EU
Ah, yes. It is that most dreaded time of the year.
I have a hard enough time waking up in the morning without having DST shaving off another precious hour of sleep. Reminds me of a very screwy day about five years ago. I caught some random twitterings about DST and started to panic about not being prepared at all to wake up an hour early. As it turns out, Germany will observe DST on March 30. So, for the next 21 days, we will be 5 hours ahead of the east coast (EST) and 8 hours ahead of pacific standard time (PST). I will relish the next 21 days.
I think DST is kind of stupid (except, of course, when it works in my favor in the fall), so I started doing some research on the history of it and why it exists today. If you have the patience to deal with this website (I barely did. Do yourself a favor and hit the Pages link once you are there. Don’t incorporate technology just because you think it is clever, especially when it’s not very usable!), you can learn some interesting stuff about DST. For instance, the clock changes at 2 AM in the US because “it was practical and minimized disruption. Most people were at home and this was the time when the fewest trains were running. It is late enough to minimally affect bars and restaurants, and it prevents the day from switching to yesterday, which would be confusing. It is early enough that the entire continental U.S. switches by daybreak, and the changeover occurs before most early shift workers and early churchgoers are affected.” Early churchgoers? Whatever. In any case, in Europe the official changeover time is 1 AM. I can’t find the history/reason on that, but it would be interesting to know what this isn’t standardized.
DST was first conceived of by Benjamin Franklin. What an overachiever. The bifocals, the furnace stove, the odometer, and countless other inventions just weren’t enough. He first wrote about DST in 1784, but the concept didn’t gain footing until 1907 when Londoner William Willett wrote ”A Waste of Daylight” and spent a lot of time and effort lobbying for DST.
Germany and Austria were the first to implement DST in 1916, followed by several other countries—the US got on board a full two years later and made it law. It was so unpopular that it was repealed in 1919, but saw the light of day [hah—get it?] again during WWII in 1942 -45 when it was known officially as “War Time”. After that, observing DST was a regional thing so much confusion arose from lack of standardization. Only as late as 1986, did DST get more under control after legislation was passed that mandated “Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. began at 2:00 a.m. on the first Sunday of April and ended at 2:00 a.m. on the last Sunday of October.”
Before DST, there was Standard Time which was implement in England in 1840 and was known as London time. In the US, this concept of standardized time didn’t take hold until 1883, mostly driven by the transportation industry, which was similar to how England adopted the concept (in both cases, the railways were a huge factor for Standard Time and the concept of Time Zones). “Prior to that, time of day was a local matter, and most cities and towns used some form of local solar time, maintained by a well-known clock (on a church steeple, for example, or in a jeweler’s window).” Amazing! Especially since the first pocket watch was invented in 1504 by German Peter Henlein.
