Saving daylight
BY RAY VAN COR
The Greenville Standard
Daylight saving time means advancing our clocks by one hour so that darkness falls an hour later and vice versa for the Fall, hence “spring forward, and “fall back.”
The idea for this was to conserve candles and was proposed in 1784 by Benjamin Franklin the very Ike that discovered electricity.
Franklin suggested that waking up earlier in the summer would save on candles. Remember Franklin’s published proverb “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”, he left out dull as well.
New Zealand entomologist and astronomer George Hudson in 1895, proposed the idea of changing clocks by two hours every spring so he would have more daylight to chase his bugs.
In 1907, William Willet, a British resident, presented the idea as a way to save energy and the idea took hold.
After some very serious thought it was implemented. In 1908, Port Arthur in Ontario, Canada, near Thunder Bay, started using daylight saving time on April, 30 1916.
The German Empire and Austria-Hungary each organized the first nationwide implementation in their jurisdictions and many countries have used daylight saving time at different times since then, especially during the 70’s energy crisis.
Daylight saving time was first implemented in the U.S. with the Standard Time Act of 1918, a wartime measure for seven months during World War I in the interest of adding more daylight hours to conserve energy resources.
Daylight saving time Year-round, or “War Time”, was implemented again during World War II. After the war, local jurisdictions were free to choose if and when to observe daylight saving time until the Uniform Time Act which standardized daylight saving time in 1966.
It was believed that the United States daylight saving time was first implemented for the benefit of farmers, which was a bloody lie.
Farmers have been the strongest group lobbying against daylight saving time since it was first implemented due to farming schedules dictated by the sun.
Permanent daylight saving time was enacted for the winter of 1974, but it was repealed a year later due to complaints of children going to school in the dark and having to travel and start work in the dark during the winter months.
Daylight saving time must be a serious issue for our government because Congressman Barry Moore’s Office sent a text out last Saturday requesting we take a poll about daylight saving time.
I’m curious how many of us used daylight saving time as an excuse to miss church last Sunday?
