History
Ancient
water clock that lets hour lengths vary with season
Although they did not fix their schedules to the clock in the modern sense, ancient civilizations adjusted daily schedules to the sun more flexibly than DST does, often dividing daylight into twelve hours regardless of daytime, so that (for example) each daylight hour became progressively longer during spring and shorter during autumn.
[20] For example, the
Romans kept time with
water clocks that had different scales for different months of the year: at Rome's latitude the third hour from sunrise,
hora tertia, started by modern standards at 09:02
solar time and lasted 44 minutes at the winter
solstice, but at the summer solstice it started at 06:58 and lasted 75 minutes.
[21] From the fourteenth century onwards, equal-length civil hours supplanted unequal ones, so
civil time no longer varies by season. Unequal hours are still used in a few traditional settings, such as some monasteries of
Mount Athos[22] and all
Jewish ceremonies.
[23]
During his time as an American envoy to France (1776–1785),
Benjamin Franklin, publisher of the old English proverb "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise",
[24][25] anonymously published a letter in the
Journal de Paris suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight.
[26] This 1784
satire proposed taxing
window shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise.
[27] Despite common misconception, Franklin did
not actually propose DST; 18th-century Europe did not even keep precise schedules. However, this soon changed as rail transport and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in Franklin's day.
[28]
In 1810, the Spanish National Assembly,
Cortes of Cádiz, issued a regulation that moved the sitting of certain meeting times forward by one hour from 1 May to 30 September in recognition of seasonal changes but did not actually change the clocks. It also acknowledged that private businesses were in the practice of changing their opening hours to suit daylight conditions but did so on their own volition.
[29][30]
George Hudson invented modern DST, proposing it first in 1895.
The
New Zealand entomologist George Hudson first proposed modern DST. Hudson's
shift-work job gave him leisure time to collect insects and led him to value after-hours daylight.
[4] In 1895 he presented a paper to the
Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift,
[11] and after considerable interest was expressed in
Christchurch, he followed up with an 1898 paper.
[31] Many publications credit DST proposal to the prominent English builder and outdoorsman
William Willett,
[32] who independently conceived DST in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day.
[16] An avid golfer, Willett also disliked cutting short his round at dusk.
[33] His solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later.
[34] The
Liberal Party member of parliament (MP)
Robert Pearce took up Willett's proposal, introducing the first Daylight Saving Bill to the
House of Commons on February 12, 1908.
[35] A
select committee was set up to examine the issue, but Pearce's bill did not become law, and several other bills failed in the following years. Willett lobbied for the proposal in the UK until his death in 1915.
Port Arthur, Ontario, Canada, was the first city in the world to enact DST on July 1, 1908.
[36][37] This was followed by
Orillia, Ontario, introduced by William Sword Frost while mayor from 1911 to 1912.
[38]
The first states to adopt DST (
German:
Sommerzeit) nationally were those of the
German Empire and its
World War I ally
Austria-Hungary commencing April 30, 1916 as a way to conserve coal during wartime. Britain, most of its
allies, and many European neutrals soon followed. Russia and a few other countries waited until the next year, and the
United States adopted daylight saving in 1918.
Broadly speaking, most jurisdictions abandoned daylight saving time in the years after the war ended in 1918 (with some notable exceptions including Canada, the UK, France, Ireland, and the United States). However, many different places adopted it for periods of time during the following decades and it became common during
World War II. It became widely adopted, particularly in North America and Europe, starting in the 1970s as a result of the
1970s energy crisis.
Since then, the world has seen many enactments, adjustments, and repeals.
[39] For specific details, see
Daylight saving time by country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#History
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