All About Daylight Savings Time

I once knew a farmer who refused to observe Daylight Saving Time. Ohio is one of the states that adheres to the DST laws, but the farmer flatly refused to move the clocks in his house ahead one hour. Why? Because, he said, his cows were used to being milked at five A.M. every morning. He woke up at four A.M. sharp every morning. And, he declared, there was no way he was going to mess up their- and his- internal clocks.

Daylight Saving Time, (DST), is the practice of adjusting the time in the spring so there are more daylight hours when people are normally awake. In Ohio, people often remember when to adjust their clocks by reciting the phrase, "Spring ahead, Fall back."

Even though the time change takes effect at 2:00 a.m. so it causes the least amount of confusion, many people, like my farmer friend, don't like the disruption this practice causes in their lives. So, whose "bright" idea was Daylight Saving Time, and what's it all about anyway?

Benjamin Franklin was actually the first person that the idea of changing time "dawned on". But his idea wasn't taken seriously until a London man named William Willett (1857-1915) authored a piece titled, "Waste of Daylight", in 1907. Willett's idea was to move time ahead twenty minutes every Sunday in April. Then, reverse the process to go back to standard time in September. But the British government nixed his idea, and Willett wouldn't live long enough to see it ever "come to light."

It was almost a decade later when the German government finally initiated their own Daylight Saving Time during part of World War I. The United Kingdom began their DST in 1916. Then, on March 19, 1918, the United States Government adopted DST until the end of World War I. However, just like today, people disliked the change in the time so much that the law was later abolished.