Preparing for Daylight Saving Time: When to Set Your Clock Forward and a Brief History of the Time Change

This weekend, most Americans, including those in Illinois, will set their clocks ahead by an hour, bringing warmer weather and longer, brighter days.

In states observing daylight saving time, the clocks will advance to 3 a.m. on Sunday, the official time change hour.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which modified the Uniform Time Act of 1966, stipulated that daylight saving time would start on the second Sunday in March every year. The law provides that the time change will be in force through the first Sunday in November.

According to officials, the alteration will move sunset closer to 7 p.m., breaking a record that will be achieved on St. Patrick’s Day next week. There will be one less hour of sleep due to the longer daylight hours.

This is all the information you require on DST.

What is daylight saving time?

Daylight saving time, sometimes known as “spring forward” and “fall back,” is a time change that normally occurs in the spring and finishes in the fall.

According to the regulations of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, DST starts on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November.

On those days, clocks either advance or fall behind by one hour.

But things were sometimes different.

To give kids more time to trick-or-treat, the clocks were changed from springing forward on the first Sunday in April to staying ahead until the last Sunday in October.

In the states that observe it, daylight saving time lasts 34 weeks, from the beginning of March to the beginning of November.

When he wrote in a 1784 essay about saving candles and said, “Early to bed, early to wake makes a man well, wealthy, and clever,” some people liked to credit Benjamin Franklin as the inventor. Yet that was more intended as humor than as a serious thought.

To save fuel, Germany was the first country to implement daylight saving time on May 1, 1916, during World War I, the United States and the rest of the world.

The United States established daylight saving time on March 19, 1918. It was disliked and eliminated following World War I.

Franklin Roosevelt implemented year-round daylight saving time on February 9, 1942, referring to it as “wartime.” It continued until September 30, 1945.

The Uniform Time Act of 1966, which imposed standard time across the nation within designated time zones, was the law that made daylight saving time mandatory in the US. It specified that on the final Sunday in April and the last Sunday in October, the clocks would go forward by one hour at 2 a.m., respectively.

States may still exempt themselves if they did so as a whole. Congress implemented an energy-saving trial of year-round daylight saving time from January 1974 to April 1975 in the 1970s due to the 1973 oil embargo.

First Used in Canada in 1908

Although Canada beat the German Empire by eight years in 1916, it is a little-known fact that Germany and Austria were the first nations to implement DST. The first DST period began on July 1, 1908, when people in Port Arthur, Ontario—Thunder today’s Bay—moved their clocks ahead by an hour.

Canada’s other regions eventually followed suit. DST was introduced in Regina, Saskatchewan, on April 23, 1914. On April 24, 1916, Winnipeg and Brandon in Manitoba did so. The Manitoba Free Press reported in its April 3, 1916, issue that Regina’s DST “proved so popular that bylaw now takes it into force automatically.”

Germany Popularized DST

However, the concept became widely accepted when Germany enacted DST in 1916. On April 30, 1916, two years into World War I, time was advanced by one hour throughout the German Empire and its ally Austria. The goal was to utilize as little artificial illumination as possible to conserve fuel for the war effort.

The United Kingdom, France, and numerous others soon adopted the concept. After World War I, most of them switched to standard time, and DST was reinstated in most of Europe during the Second World War.

Who Invented DST?

You can thank British architect William Willett and New Zealand physicist George Vernon Hudson for the notion of Daylight Saving Time. Hudson suggested a 2-hour shift forward in October and a 2-hour shift back in March in a paper that he delivered to the Wellington Philosophical Society in 1895. 

Independent of Hudson, British builder William Willett proposed eight-time changes annually in 1905: 20-minute time changes on each of the four Sundays in April and a 20-minute time change on each of the four Sundays in September.

First Daylight Saving Bill

Robert Pearce, a British Member of Parliament, was interested in Willett’s Daylight Saving scheme, and in February 1908, he filed a bill to the House of Commons. A select committee reviewed the first Daylight Saving Law developed in 1909 and submitted to Parliament on many occasions. The proposal was opposed by many people, particularly farmers; hence the bill was never passed into law.

Before the UK adopted DST in May 1916, Willett passed away in 1915. Seven years before he passed away in a small Ontario village, it is unknown if he knew that his idea had come to pass.

Benjamin Franklin, the Father of DST?

According to many accounts, Benjamin Franklin is credited with being the first to propose seasonal time change. The American politician and inventor’s concept, nevertheless, can scarcely be regarded as important to modern DST’s advancement. After all, there wasn’t even a clock adjustment.

In a letter to the editor of the Journal of Paris, entitled “An Economical Proposal for Diminishing the Expense of Light,” Franklin suggested that Parisians should economize candle usage by getting people out of bed earlier in the morning. Franklin also meant it as a joke.

An Ancient Idea

Although contemporary DST is roughly 100 years old, similar procedures were adopted by ancient civilizations thousands of years ago. To align daily routines with solar time, for instance, Roman water clocks utilized several weights for the various months of the year.

Daylight Saving Today

Around 70 countries presently adopt daylight saving time, which affects over a billion people annually. The start and end dates differ from one nation to the next.