With daylight savings coming up, it’s good to have a reminder of why it’s here in the first place and to question the biyearly changing of clocks. At this point, almost everyone knows that it’s not exactly the most useful phenomenon anymore. Soon enough, there will be a point where it will be deemed useless then wash away into history, so we should keep it in memory until then.
What many of us were taught in school was that Benjamin Franklin invented it for farmers, or some iteration of that fact, but its roots can actually only be traced all the way back to Germany in 1916. According to Colorado University Boulder sleep researcher Kenneth Wright, It was first introduced in Germany in 1916 during World War I as an energy saving measure, a completely different narrative than what we are used to. The myth of Benjamin Franklin’s hand in making daylight savings was from a satirical paper about using sunshine instead of candles for light to save money.
While the idea of daylight savings doesn’t date back as far as most people might think, the widespread practice is even newer than that. In the year 1966, congress passed the Uniform Time Act to take away a lot of the confusion of daylight savings and even make it an official observation. This dates its official status as an observation to about 59 years ago. To put that into perspective, an average grandparent would have been alive before daylight savings was standardized.
Now, why do we still observe it today? There isn’t much of a concern with it as of recently. In fact, two states, Hawaii and Arizona, have stopped observing it. Even other countries, such as Iran, Russia, and Turkey have already stopped the practice. One reason some people still observe daylight savings is to save on power and use the daylight, but that’s not much of a concern anymore, and even if it was a bigger concern, we could just decide which part of daylight savings is more efficient and stick with it. It’s not strictly beneficial for farming either. All the problems could be solved by setting alarms for different times instead of turning back the whole clock.
Even in politics, there is talk of scrapping the whole idea in favor of one standard time. Recent statements from the president have made that very clear. The only thing left for us to wonder is when it will happen. All signs point to its irrelevancy, so it’s just a matter of time until it goes for good.
