Daylight Savings Time

I dislike the spring side of Daylight Saving Time. Gaining an hour's sleep in the fall I don't have a problem with. Losing an hour in the spring--aye, there's the rub.

Someone once told me that DST began when we were more of an agricultural community, so kids could still help out on the farm in the a.m. before school. But apparently this rationale is false. Per a WebExhibit article:

Farmers often dislike the clocks changing mid-year. Canadian poultry producer Marty Notenbomer notes, "The chickens do not adapt to the changed clock until several weeks have gone by, so the first week of April and the last week of October are very frustrating for us."

Some purport that it was Mr. Ben Franklin who first suggested the idea of Daylight Savings Time. Wikipedia asserts that he was being facetious:

It is sometimes asserted that DST was first proposed by Benjamin Franklin in a letter to the editors of the Journal of Paris. Read the full text. However, the article was humorous; Franklin was not proposing DST, but rather that people should get up and go to bed earlier.

So where did it come from? Again, Wikipedia:

The idea of daylight saving time was first put into practice by the German government during the First World War.

So there you have it!

Tags: daylight savings, origin of daylight savings time, dst, spring forward, daylight savings time, why daylight savings