Daylight saving time
In a satirical letter to the editor of the Journal de Paris in 1784, Benjamin Franklin suggested that if Parisians could only wake up earlier in the summer they would economize on candle and oil usage, but he did not propose changing the clocks.
[3][4] In 1895, New Zealand entomologist and astronomer George Hudson made the first realistic proposal to change clocks by two hours every spring to the Wellington Philosophical Society, but this was not implemented until 1928 and in another form.
The time of day that individuals begin and end work or school, and the coordination of mass transit, for example, usually remain constant year-round.
In contrast, an agrarian society's daily routines for work and personal conduct are more likely governed by the length of daylight hours[9][10] and by solar time, which change seasonally because of the Earth's axial tilt.
The longer evening daylight hours are attractive to golfers, for example, while farmers traditionally expressed dislike for having to be out working while dew is still heavy.
[25] This 1784 satire proposed taxing window shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise.
[33] Liberal Party member of parliament Robert Pearce took up the proposal, introducing the first Daylight Saving Bill to the British House of Commons on 12 February 1908.
[38][39][40] The factors that influence farming schedules, such as morning dew and dairy cattle's readiness to be milked, are ultimately dictated by the sun, so the clock change introduces unnecessary challenges.
[38][40][41] DST was first implemented in the US with the Standard Time Act of 1918, a wartime measure for seven months during World War I in the interest of adding more daylight hours to conserve energy resources.
Notable exceptions today include Lord Howe Island with a thirty-minute change, and Troll (research station) that shifts two hours directly between CEST and GMT since 2016.
[61][62][63] The 2005 extension was motivated in part by lobbyists from the candy industry, seeking to increase profits by including Halloween (31 October) within the daylight saving time period.
[66] Winston Churchill argued that it enlarges "the opportunities for the pursuit of health and happiness among the millions of people who live in this country"[67] and pundits have dubbed it "Daylight Slaving Time".
It attracted many supporters, including Arthur Balfour, Churchill, David Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, King Edward VII (who used half-hour DST or "Sandringham time" at Sandringham), the managing director of Harrods, and the manager of the National Bank Ltd.[74] However, the opposition proved stronger, including Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, William Christie (the Astronomer Royal), George Darwin, Napier Shaw (director of the Meteorological Office), many agricultural organizations, and theatre-owners.
[75] People in the US demonstrated even more skepticism; Andrew Peters introduced a DST bill to the House of Representatives in May 1909, but it soon died in committee.
[76] Germany and its allies led the way in introducing DST during World War I on 30 April 1916, aiming to alleviate hardships due to wartime coal shortages and air-raid blackouts.
[79] Britain proved an exception; it retained DST nationwide but adjusted transition dates over the years for several reasons, including special rules during the 1920s and 1930s to avoid clock shifts on Easter mornings.
[82] Wilson's successor as president, Warren G. Harding, opposed DST as a "deception", reasoning that people should instead get up and go to work earlier in the summer.
[89] In 2003, the United Kingdom's Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents supported a proposal to observe year-round daylight saving time, but it has been opposed by some industries, by some postal workers and farmers, and particularly by those living in the northern regions of the UK.
Since 2018, Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio has repeatedly filed bills to extend daylight saving time permanently into winter, without success.
[115] It has been argued that clock shifts correlate with decreased economic efficiency and that in 2000, the daylight-saving effect implied an estimated one-day loss of $31 billion on US stock exchanges.
In 2018, the European Parliament, reviewing a possible abolition of DST, approved a more in-depth evaluation examining the disruption of the human body's circadian rhythms which provided evidence suggesting the existence of an association between DST clock-shifts and a modest increase of occurrence of acute myocardial infarction, especially in the first week after the spring shift.
Furthermore, they detected, through analysis of over three million real-world charitable donations, that the loss of sleep inflicted by the transition to daylight saving time reduces altruistic giving compared to controls (being states not implementing DST).
[149] Another study, which also examined sleep manipulation due to the shift to daylight saving time in the spring, analyzed archival data from judicial punishment imposed by US federal courts which showed sleep-deprived judges exact more severe penalties.
[123] Some clock-shift problems could be avoided by adjusting clocks continuously[157] or at least more gradually[158]—for example, Willett at first suggested weekly 20-minute transitions—but this would add complexity and has never been implemented.
For example, the 2007 change to DST rules in North America required that many computer systems be upgraded, with the greatest onus on e-mail and calendar programs.
[171] A move to permanent daylight saving time (staying on summer hours all year with no clock shifts) is sometimes advocated and is currently implemented in some jurisdictions such as Argentina, Belarus,[172] Iceland, Kyrgyzstan, Morocco,[53] Namibia, Saskatchewan, Singapore, Syria, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Yukon.
[citation needed] The United Kingdom and Ireland put clocks forward by an extra hour during World War II and experimented with year-round summer time between 1968 and 1971.
Surveys reported between 2021 and 2022 by the National Sleep Foundation, YouGov, CBS, and Monmouth University indicate more Americans would prefer permanent DST.
[198][199] The National Sleep Foundation, YouGov, and Monmouth University polls leaned significantly in favor of seeing daylight saving time made permanent.
[196] The NORC at the University of Chicago found 79% of those interviewed to be in favor of permanent DST during the Oil Crisis in December 1973; 42% of poll takers supported it the following February.
