New Delhi: We dream of having more than 24 hours a day and having extra time to sleep. But imagine all this coming true. In the US, people did indeed get additional time besides 24 hours. Daylight saving time, which happens twice annually, is a time change that does impact millions of Americans. On Sundays in the USA, at 2 am (local time), clocks in most states “fell back” by an hour, which gives people an extra hour of sleep. Not only this but they were also allowed more daylight in the morning.
Time adjustment affects millions of Americans daily, prompting clock changes. In this article, let us learn what daylight saving time means.
What is daylight saving time?
In the USA and Canada, Daylight Saving Time is also known as daylight saving/s, daylight savings time or daylight time, while in the United Kingdom (UK), European Union (EU) and others, it is called summer time. It is a practice of advancing clocks to use the daylight available better so that darkness falls later.
Daylight Saving Time (DST) usually means moving clocks forward by one hour in the spring or late winter. In the autumn, clocks are set back by one hour to return to standard time. A common way to remember this is the phrase: “spring forward and fall back”.
Daylight Saving Time: History
While Germany and Austria were the first countries to use Daylight Saving Time (DST), it is little known that Canadians were the first to do so. On July 1, 1908, the people in Ontario’s Thunder Bay used the first DST when they turned their clocks forward by an hour. Soon after this, many other regions in Canada followed suit.
However, the idea went global when Germany introduced DST in 1916. On April 30, 1916, the clocks in the German Empire and its ally Austria were first turned ahead by one hour, two years into World War I. The motive for DST was to minimise the use of artificial lighting to save fuel for the war effort.
Within a few weeks, the United Kingdom, France, and many other countries followed the idea. Most of them reverted to standard time after World War I, and it wasn’t until the next World War that DST returned to most of Europe.
Who is the inventor of Daylight Saving Time?
George Vernon Hudson, a New Zealand scientist, and William Willett, a British builder, are behind the invention of DSG. Hudson presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society in 1895, proposing a 2-hour shift forward in October and a 2-hour shift back in March. While there was interest in the idea, it was never followed through.
In 1905, William Willett proposed a system for shifting the clocks. He suggested moving the clocks ahead by 20 minutes on each of the four Sundays in April and turning them back the same way each Sunday in September, for a total of eight clock changes each year.
Benjamin Franklin was an early advocate for changing the time seasonally, according to some sources. But, his idea is not essential to modern DST. Franklin had suggested to the people of Paris that they could save on candle usage by getting up earlier in the morning. But according to him, he made this suggestion as a joke and did not propose changing the clocks.
Daylight Saving Time in today’s time
More than 70 countries use DST, which impacts over one billion people each year. The start and end dates for DST differ from country to country.
