Daylight savings had energy-conserving roots

As spring progresses, the sun rises earlier and earlier each day. With the hassle of adjusting our clocks and the arbitrary changes in our sleep schedules, most of us have probably, at one time or another, wondered about the origin of daylight savings time.

Daylight savings is a well-practiced tradition that dates back to the World War I (WWI). During the war, resources were consumed at alarming rates, so there was an urgent need to ration raw goods for wartime production and to send finished products to the frontlines as soon as possible. As a result of the high demand, President Woodrow Wilson implemented daylight savings time.

He adopted the idea from Benjamin Franklin, who proposed that forwarding time during the summer could conserve energy by taking advantage of the extra daylight.

During WWI, Europeans quickly adopted the time-changing policy to fully maximize their war production, and the U.S. followed suit in 1918. At the conclusion of the war, President Wilson advocated for the retention of the daylight savings policy. Farmers fought against the policy because it would interfere with their sun-determined schedules. The opposition was fierce, and the policy was eventually abolished following the war.

The daylight savings schedule remained unutilized until the eruption of World War II (WWII). Under the hardships imposed again by a war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt reimplemented Wilson’s policy to help the war effort. Under Roosevelt, the policy was renamed “War Time.” At the end of WWII, the country again faced the decision of whether to keep the daylight savings schedule or to abolish it. The federal government originally left the decision to the states; however, as each state adopted its own policies, the country was thrown into a period of temporal confusion. Neighboring cities often operated according to different schedules causing complications with transportation, work schedules and proper documentation.

To clear the mess, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act. This motion imposed daylight savings time across the country and specified the dates that states would adjust their clocks.

According to the Uniform Time Act, time is adjusted forward one hour on the first Sunday of April and shifted back on the last Sunday of October. In 2006, thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, this familiar routine was modified to make daylight savings time more effective. The beginning of the daylight savings schedule is now the second Sunday of March, and the termination date is now the first Sunday in November.