A Few Details I Didn't Know About Daylight Saving Time Trivia

Photo courtesy Jeepika. Creative Commons

All my life I've called it Daylight Savings Time. This weekend I learned that I was wrong. It's Daylight Saving Time.

As usual, finding myself getting corrected regarding something I've always taken for granted leads me to wonder what other misconceptions I continue to. hold. How about you?

Here are a few other facts about Daylight Saving Time of which you may or may not have been aware.

The  official "time adjustment" occurs each spring at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. "Spring Forward, Fall Back" is how we always remind ourselves which direction to turn our clocks. 

Some people attribute Daylight Saving Time to Ben Franklin who wrote a facetious satirical piece about the idea. According to the Wikipedia entry on Daylight Saving Time, however, it was a British-born New Zealand entomologist named George Hudson who came up with the idea in 1894. His paper proposing DST was submitted to the Wellington Philosophical Society in 1895. A follow up on this notion was submitted four years later. 

The idea gained traction after Englishman William Willett published a pamphlet in 1907 titled, "The Waste of Daylight." His original idea was a little more complicated than what we ultimately adopted. He suggested moving clocks forward in spring by 80 minutes over a period of four weeks in April, and then reversing them in September. 

Attempts were made in the British Parliament to make it into law but to no avail. During WWI Germany implemented a Daylight Saving Time concept in April 1916 and Britain did the same a little later that year, primarily to save coal. In other words, it was not something the country did to help farmers as many have sometimes surmised.

* * * 

Something else I learned this weekend: Hawaii and Arizona are contrarians on this matter, preferring not to spring forward and fall back each year.

* * *

For what it's worth, when I wrote about this in 2012 I got a few facts wrong, the most embarrassing being that "s" in Savings. Again, it's Daylight Saving Time.

Alas. There are still some things Mr. Know-It-All doesn't know. 

Happy Monday and enjoy your week.