Daylight Saving Time, Should we Keep It?

According to the History Channel: Germany was the first country to enact daylight saving time. It took World War I for Willett’s dream to come true, but on April 30, 1916, Germany embraced daylight saving time to conserve electricity. (He may have been horrified to learn that Britain’s wartime enemy followed his recommendations before his homeland.) Weeks later, the United Kingdom followed suit and introduced “summer time.” Daylight saving time in the United States was not intended to benefit farmers, as many people think. Contrary to popular belief, American farmers did not lobby for daylight saving to have more time to work in the fields; in fact, the agriculture industry was deeply opposed to the time switch when it was first implemented on March 31, 1918, as a wartime measure. The sun, not the clock, dictated farmers’ schedules, so daylight saving was very disruptive. Farmers had to wait an extra hour for dew to evaporate to harvest hay, hired hands worked less since they still left at the same time for dinner and cows weren’t ready to be milked an hour earlier to meet shipping schedules. Agrarian interests led the fight for the 1919 repeal of national daylight saving time, which passed after Congress voted to override President Woodrow Wilson’s veto. Rather than rural interests, it has been urban entities such as retail outlets and recreational businesses that have championed daylight saving over the decades. For decades, daylight saving in the United States was a confounding patchwork of local practices. After the national repeal in 1919, some states and cities, including New York City and Chicago, continued to shift their clocks. National daylight saving time returned during World War II, but after its repeal three weeks after war’s end the confusing hodgepodge resumed. States and localities could start and end daylight saving whenever they pleased, a system that Time magazine (an aptly named source) described in 1963 as “a chaos of clocks.” In 1965 there were 23 different pairs of start and end dates in Iowa alone, and St. Paul, Minnesota, even began daylight saving two weeks before its twin… Read more »

“8 Things You May Not Know About Daylight Saving Time: https://www.history.com/news/8-things-you-may-not-know-about-daylight-saving-time: (1) “It’s “daylight saving time,” not “daylight savings time. Many people render the term’s second word in its plural form. However, since the word “saving” acts as part of an adjective rather than a verb, the singular is grammatically correct.” (2) “Though in favor of maximizing daylight waking hours, Benjamin Franklin did not originate the idea of moving clocks forward. By the time he was a 78-year-old American envoy in Paris in 1784, the man who espoused the virtues of “early to bed and early to rise” was not practicing what he preached. After being unpleasantly stirred from sleep at 6 a.m. by the summer sun, the founding father penned a satirical essay in which he calculated that Parisians, simply by waking up at dawn, could save the modern-day equivalent of $200 million through “the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.” As a result of this essay, Franklin is often erroneously given the honor of “inventing” daylight saving time, but he only proposed a change in sleep schedules—not the time itself.” (3) “Englishman William Willett led the first campaign to implement daylight saving time. While on an early-morning horseback ride around the desolate outskirts of London in 1905, Willett had an epiphany that the United Kingdom should move its clocks forward by 80 minutes between April and October so that more people could enjoy the plentiful sunlight. The Englishman published the 1907 brochure “The Waste of Daylight” and spent much of his personal fortune evangelizing with missionary zeal for the adoption of “summer time.” Year after year, however, the British Parliament stymied the measure, and Willett died in 1915 at age 58 without ever seeing his idea come to fruition.” (4) “Germany was the first country to enact daylight saving time. It took World War I for Willett’s dream to come true, but on April 30, 1916, Germany embraced daylight saving time to conserve electricity. (He may have been horrified to learn that Britain’s wartime enemy followed his recommendations before his homeland.) Weeks later, the United Kingdom followed… Read more »

At least the TAH server clock will be correct again so I can compete in WOT without doing the math.
The clocks in my house are UTC.
Everyone on the planet should be UTC.
No math needed.

Scrap it. It was started for farmers. Now they are mechanized. I hear some say we get an extra hour of daylight and I shake my head. There’s but the same 24 hours each day.

It’s like cutting off one end of a rug, sewing it back on the other end and thinking you have more rug.

Right now it benefits me so I say keep it. I get off night shift an hour early on Sunday because of it. Ask me again when it doesn’t benefit me and I will probably have a different answer.

Get rid of it. Makes me crabby, messes with the dogs schedule. No earthly reason for it.

I have a 64 mile commute each way to work; therefore, I have an 03:15hr get-up every day whether DST (Daylight Saving Time) or DST (Daylight Standard Time)
The difference is that with Daylight Saving Time I have the extra hour of daylight in the afternoon – I feed horses, dogs and cats in the afternoon and do not relish feeding in the dark (and Cold) even just north of Houston, TX in the winter.