Remember to turn your clocks forward one hour before you go to bed on Saturday night, March 13 so you are on time for church Sunday, March 14. 🙂
Did you know…
Whether you savor the extra sunlight in the summer or dread the jarring time jump, Daylight Saving Time is inevitable (at least in most parts of the United States). Here are some interesting tidbits about the annual time change:
- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WAS HALF-JOKING WHEN HE SUGGESTED DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME.
More than a century before Daylight Saving Time (DST) was adopted by any major country, Benjamin Franklin proposed a similar concept in a satirical essay. In the piece, published in 1784, he argued:
“All the difficulty will be in the first two or three days; after which the reformation will be as natural and easy as the present irregularity […] Oblige a man to rise at four in the morning, and it is more than probable he will go willingly to bed at eight in the evening; and, having had eight hours sleep, he will rise more willingly at four in the morning following.”
In one prophetic passage, he pitched the idea as a money-saver (though at the time people would have been conserving candle wax rather than electricity). To enforce the out-there plan, Franklin suggested taxing shutters, rationing candles, banning non-emergency coach travel after dark, and firing cannons at sunrise to rouse late-sleepers. While his essay clearly brought up some practical points, Franklin may have originally written it as an excuse to poke fun at the French for being lazy. He wrote that the amount of sunlight that goes wasted each morning would likely come as a shock to readers who “have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon.”
- OFFICIAL CREDIT FOR THE DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME IDEA GOES TO A BUG COLLECTOR.
The first serious case for DST came from a peculiar place. While working at a post office by day, an entomologist who did most of his bug hunting at night soon became frustrated by how early the Sun set during the summer months. He reasoned springing the clocks forward would allow more daylight for bug collecting—along with other evening activities. The clocks could be switched back in the winter when people (and bugs) were less likely to be found outdoors.
When the idea was proposed to a scientific society in New Zealand in 1895, it was panned for being pointless and overly complicated. Just two decades later, Daylight Saving Time would begin its spread across the developed world.
Information obtained from mentalfloss.com.
