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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.
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