Daylight Savings Time was first conceived by Benjamin Franklin while serving as an American delegate in Paris in 1784. The purpose was to make better use of daylight. Daylight Savings Time gives us the ability to enjoy summer evenings by moving our clocks forward one hour in the spring and back one hour in the fall; spring forward, fall back.
The politics behind Daylight Savings Time in the United States has been filled with controversy and conflict. To understand the situation it is necessary to first look at the history of the adoption of standard time zones.
Before the present day international time meridians were designed and used, each town had a town clock that everyone looked at for the correct time. The time was often set by using a sun dial. So each town ran on slightly different times.
A Canadian civil and railway engineer, Sandford Fleming, initiated the first effort that led to the adoption of the present day time meridians. Train schedules had made the old system of “the town clock” obsolete so the railway interests were important in standardizing time.
Mr. Fleming was instrumental in convening the 1884 International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, DC at which time the system of International Standard Time was adopted.
Daylight Savings Time has been in use in the United States and many European countries since WWI. It was formally adopted in the US on March 19, 1918 and began on March 31, 1918.
After the war people objected to Daylight Savings Time (they went to bed earlier than people do today) and it was repealed in 1919. At that time it became a local option for cities and states.
During WWII, President Franklin Roosevelt initiated year round Daylight Savings Time calling it “War Time”. This period lasted from Feb.19, 1942 to Sept.30, 1945.
There was no federal law regarding Daylight Savings Time from 1945 until 1966. Since some places used it while others didn’t, it caused confusion for businesses that ran on schedules like transportation or mass media.
In the 1960s, observance of Daylight Savings Time was inconsistent across the US. The nation’s timekeeper, The Interstate Commerce Commission was immobilized while different interests fought for their time preference.
There was a bitter fight between indoor and outdoor movie theater interests. The farmers opposed it, while many businesses supported it; state and local governments went one way or the other depending on local conditions.
The Committee for Time Uniformity, a transportation industry organization, surveyed the nation and reported a complex and confusing situation. The Committee rallied the nation with a front page story in The New York Times disclosing that on a 35 mile stretch of road, between W. Virginia and Ohio, the time had changed seven times.
The Uniform Time Act of 1966 was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson creating a national Daylight Savings Time. States could exempt themselves by passing a state law.
Since then there have been a number of changes to the dates of Daylight Savings Time.
The most recent was the Energy Policy Act of 2005 which extended the starting and ending dates to 2AM on the second Sunday of March and 2AM on the first Sunday of November.
In 2010, Daylight Savings Time starts on March 14 and ends on November 7.
