Day­light Sav­ing Time

MISHAWAKA, IND.-- Sun­day, Nov. 4, is the end of Day­light Sav­ing Time, so do not for­get to turn back your clocks!  

Con­trary to pop­u­lar be­lief, it was not Ben­jamin Franklin who first pro­posed Day­light Sav­ing Time. Al­though he did anony­mously pub­lish a satir­i­cal piece in the Jour­nal de Paris sug­gest­ing that in or­der to help Parisians take bet­ter ad­van­tage of day­light hours, the city should place a tax on win­dow shut­ters, ra­tion can­dles and waken cit­i­zens at sun­rise with ring­ing church bells and the fir­ing of canons.  

It was the New Zealand entomologist George Hudson who first proposed Daylight Saving Time in a paper he published in 1895, and then revised and re-published in 1898.  Credit is also commonly given to the Englishman William Willet, who independently conceived the idea in 1905.   The first city to enact Daylight Saving Time was Port Arthur, Ontario, Canada, on July 1, 1908. The first nations to enact Daylight Saving Time were Germany and Austria-Hungary, beginning on April 30, 1916, as a way to conserve coal during World War I.   The United States adopted Daylight Saving Time in 1918, though not every state participated. It became more widely enacted in North America and Europe during the energy crisis of the 1970’s. Today, the only states in the United States that do not observe Daylight Saving Time are Arizona and Hawaii.