Daylight Savings Time

Why is Daylight Savings Time a thing?

When I was a kid, I heard the urban legend that DST was invented so that we kids could wait for the bus during the daylight in the mornings. When the time would fall back every year, 7 AM’s sunrise became 6 AM’s sunrise, and by the time we were waiting for the bus to pick us up, it was fully daylight.

There was an added benefit for us kids when time would spring forward, too. Because the day started later, it also ended later, meaning we could play outside for an hour longer during the summer!

Although this idea is a common argument for keeping DST around, it’s not the reason it got started in the first place.

The reason why Daylight Savings Time exists is actually embedded in the name. The idea originated from wanting to save (conserve) the precious daylight hours, so that people could get more work doing during daylight without needing to turn the electric lights on at night so much.

This might seem odd, since we don’t think much today about flipping a switch to turn the overhead light on, but at the turn of the 20th century, this was very much not the case! Due to the inefficiency of the electrical grid and the so-so quality of the light bulbs themselves, the cost to light a single room was many times higher than it is today.

This meant that saving the precious daylight for when you needed it was incredibly important.

Today, people rightly debate whether that original benefit matters enough any more to keep DST going. Those other arguments are taking place, too, like the idea that kids can catch the bus when it’s light outside. However, the weight of the counterarguments is strong.

Chief among these is that you don’t have to spend nearly so much to light your house up any more. The main reason for the creation of DST doesn’t seem as compelling now that we have technology that solves the underlying problem.

Still, there’s a different type of economic argument in favor of DST: people will go out and shop (and eat dinner or buy a few drinks) if it’s daylight for longer in the evenings. This seems like the most compelling argument to me—people’s livelihoods are almost always a leading bulwark against change, like when the Luddites protested technological improvements that would put a great many people out of work.

In that case, maybe we should call it Daylight Spending Time.

The second type of argument in favor of DST is the one I alluded to earlier—kids playing outside for an extra hour might sound trivial, but it’s indicative of us following our circadian rhythm. As far as I was concerned, I existed on this planet in order to play until the Sun went down every day. This mental health benefit doesn’t just help kids, either.

On the other hand, does this benefit outweigh the simplicity we’d gain by never changing our clocks? That’s a very good question.

The whole idea of DST may well have begun as a joke by one of our nation’s founding fathers, Ben Franklin. He wrote an essay called "An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light," and he suggested that the people of Paris could save a great deal on candles by waking up earlier. This was supposed to poke fun at his fellow Parisians (Franklin was serving as the American envoy to France), whom Franklin admired and liked.

Someone read the idea and took it somewhat seriously, and by 1966, the Uniform Time Act had passed, making it official (although states and territories can opt out). Hawaii and Arizona (except the Navajo Nation) are the two states that currently don’t practice DST.

There’s more to the story of how DST became embedded in our way of life, including two World Wars where that energy savings I poked fun at earlier really, really mattered. Even still, I like to imagine that Franklin’s lighthearted criticism of his Parisian friends ultimately led us here.

Let me turn this to you now: did you have Daylight Savings Time growing up as a kid? Do you have DST where you are today? Would we be better off if we just got rid of it everywhere, or is there a more compelling reason to keep it?