Today in History—March 31: How WWI Invented Daylight Saving Time
World War I was raging, and countries were increasingly desperate for coal—desperate enough to bend time.
The idea was simple: Stretch limited supplies of oil and gas by reducing consumers’ use of artificial light by shifting the clock to give them another hour of evening daylight. Thus, Daylight Saving Time was born.
Germany tried it first, in 1916, a radical and slightly panicked move in the face of a British blockade. It worked (possibly because consumers were too scared to violate the wartime law). Britain, facing its own shortages with miners enlisted and the coal supply strained, quickly followed with “summer time.”
The U.S. joined the party a bit later (time pun not intended). Pres. Woodrow Wilson signed the Standard Time Act in 1918, which went into effect on this day.
Whether it actually reduced energy consumption is still debated, but what’s clear is that it was widely unpopular. Farmers were some of the loudest critics: They set their schedules by the sun and did not appreciate losing an hour of morning light, which made getting goods to markets and onto trains even harder.
After the war Congress promptly undid the act. President Wilson put up a fight, but the lawmakers overrode his veto, and that was that.
Until World War II, anyway. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt brought it back. This time we called it (the slightly ominous) “war time.” And then the same thing happened: The war ended, the act was repealed.
Blame Ben Franklin: He proposed Daylight Saving Time in 1784, suggesting it would save French merchants 1 million francs a year on candles.
But what followed was chaos. States, counties, and even individual cities started implementing their own versions of Daylight Saving Time. By 1965, two neighboring towns in the same county could be living on different times. For obvious reasons, this especially bothered the transit industry.
So, in 1966 the government stepped in. The Universal Time Act set Daylight Saving Time nationwide while offering an option for states to opt out (here’s looking at you, Arizona and Hawaii).
What’s been a mild national irritation ever since for the rest of us is actually just an echo of a wartime shortage.
- 0: Countries on permanent, year-round Daylight Saving Time
- 7: Days it takes the average human body to adjust to the new time
- 6 percent: Increase in fatal car accidents in the first days after the clocks spring forward
- 1861: The Confederacy takes control of the U.S. mint at New Orleans
- 1880: Wabash, Indiana, becomes the first town in the U.S. fully lit by electricity
- 1889: The Eiffel Tower is inaugurated
