SPRING FORWARD

On Sunday, March 9, 2014, at 2:00 a.m., the United States will enter Daylight Savings Time, setting clocks forward an hour. While the adherence to DST is societal in the U.S., a surprisingly low amount of people know the purpose or history of the system. First proposed by New Zealand entomologist, George Vernon Hudson, in 1895, the concept of setting clocks forward during the summer months was not readily accepted. Many publications also give credit to William Willett, and English builder, for the proposal of DTS and drawing attention to the system from Robert Pearce, who went on to propose DST to the House of Commons in 1908. Benjamin Franklin has also been erroneously accredited for proposing Daylight Savings Time, as he published a satire in 1784 that drew on a similar idea as DST for humor. Regardless, DST was not implemented for another 8 years after Pearce’s proposal, being adopted by Germany and Austria-Hungary on April 30, 1916. Designed to increase to number of daylight hours that people are awake for (and, therefore, increasing daylight hours available after work), Germany and Austria-Hungary used the earlier daylight to lower coal usage during World War I. Soon afterward, Britain and other European countries began to adopt DST. After WWI, Daylight Savings Time was been used sporadically in many countries, with Western Europe and North America being the regions whose countries kept the system the longest. Naturally, countries close to the equator or the far Northern or Southern hemispheres have little use for DST, as the former receive steady daylight year round, and the latter have seasonal shifts in daylight too severe for an extra hour or two to matter. As was the case with WWI, WWII saw another boom of countries who used DST. The United States and the vast majority of European countries began their widespread use of DST in the 1970s, as a method of counteracting the 1970s Energy Crisis. Daylight Savings Time in the U.S. will end on November 2 of this year.