Why does daylight savings exist?

The stated aim is to move an hour of summer daylight out of the early morning, when most people are asleep, and into the evening, to cut the electricity burned on lighting. Germany introduced it in 1916 to conserve power during the First World War, and later American laws extended it on energy grounds.

Why did farmers oppose daylight saving time?

Farm work follows the sun rather than the clock. Hay could not be cut until the dew had burned off, hired hands still stopped at the same dinner hour so their working day shortened, and cows were not ready to be milked an hour early to meet rescheduled shipping.

Did Benjamin Franklin invent daylight saving time?

No. Benjamin Franklin's 1784 letter to the Journal de Paris proposed a tax of a louis on every shuttered window, a limit of one pound of candles per family per week, and waking Paris with church bells and cannon fired in the streets. It never proposes moving a clock.

When does daylight saving time start and end in the United States?

Daylight saving time begins at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday in March and ends at 2:00 a.m. on the first Sunday in November, a window NIST measures at 238 days, about 65% of the year. Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and Arizona do not observe it, though the Navajo Nation inside Arizona does.

Did Daylight Saving Time Start for Farmers? They Killed It

Q: Did daylight saving time start for farmers?

No. It began as a wartime fuel measure, adopted nationally by Germany on April 30, 1916 and by the United States in a law enacted March 19, 1918. American farmers never lobbied for it, and agrarian interests led the successful fight to repeal it in 1919.

Ask who daylight saving time was invented for and the answer comes back the same everywhere: farmers. They wanted more daylight in the fields, so the government moved the clocks forward to give it to them, and the change we still perform twice a year is a favour to agriculture that has outlived the farms it was meant for.

That explanation is tidy, and it comes around every March and every November. It is also backwards. The people credited with asking for daylight saving are the people who got rid of it.

Did daylight saving time start for farmers?

No. Daylight saving was a wartime fuel measure. Germany adopted it on April 30, 1916 to conserve electricity, and the United States copied it in a law enacted March 19, 1918. American farmers never lobbied for it. The agriculture industry opposed the change, and agrarian interests led the fight that repealed daylight saving in 1919.

The farm lobby is what ended it

The switch began on March 31, 1918, and History.com’s account of the rollout records the agriculture industry as strongly opposed from that first season. A year later the opposition had its way. In 1919 Congress voted to repeal the daylight saving section of the 1918 law. President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the repeal. Congress overrode the veto, and the national clock change was gone. That November, Wilson proclaimed the first Armistice Day, the holiday now called Veterans Day.

What survived was patchy. The WebExhibits Daylight Saving Time exhibit records that the practice continued as a local option in a few states, among them Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and in cities including New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. The Congressional Research Service dates the national gap precisely: year-round standard time held from 1920 through 1941.

Dew, cows and hired hands all kept solar time

The farm objection was mechanical rather than sentimental. Hay could not be cut until the dew had burned off, and the dew answers to sunrise, so an advanced clock added an hour of standing around. Hired hands still walked off at the same dinner hour, which shortened the working day rather than lengthening it. Cows were not ready to be milked an hour earlier merely because the milk train had been rescheduled. Some crops keep a stricter timetable than hay: ripe sesame pods split and spill their seed, so the harvest is a race to cut the plant before they open.

Legislating the clock does not move the sun. It moves the farm out of step with the towns it sells to, and in 1918 the towns had the schedule while the farms had the sunlight.

Franklin proposed cannon fire, not clock changes

The other half of the origin story credits Benjamin Franklin, and reading what he actually wrote is the quickest way to retire it.

His 1784 letter to the Journal de Paris reads as satire aimed at Parisians who slept through the morning. The remedies escalate. A tax of a louis per window on every window fitted with shutters to keep out the light of the sun. Guards posted in the shops of the wax and tallow chandlers, so that no family could be supplied with more than one pound of candles per week. More guards stopping every coach in the streets after sunset, except those of physicians, surgeons and midwives. Then the finish: “Every morning, as soon as the sun rises, let all the bells in every church be set ringing; and if that is not sufficient, let cannon be fired in every street, to wake the sluggards effectually.”

Not one line proposes moving a clock. History.com states the misattribution plainly: Franklin proposed a change in sleep schedules, not a change to the time itself. Confident misattributions stick because repeating them is easier than checking them, which is roughly why people still argue over whether a flag flies at half mast or half staff.

The same 1918 act drew America’s time zones

The statute that gave the United States daylight saving is titled “An Act to preserve daylight and provide standard time for the United States”, and it did both jobs in one text. The Congressional Research Service records that the 1918 law, also called the Calder Act, established five standard time zones for the continental United States and Alaska and set the summer clock change alongside them. The railroads had run on four standard time zones of their own since 1883, and the act put future boundary changes in the hands of the Interstate Commerce Commission.

When the farm lobby won in 1919, it repealed only the daylight saving section. The zones stayed. Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific are the surviving half of the same law that produced the clock change everyone credits to farming.

Official time is a legislative artefact rather than a natural fact, which is how a unit as ordinary-sounding as a moment could once be a fixed 90 seconds.

Eighty minutes, in four steps, and every rule since

The scheme Britain debated was stranger than the one the world settled on. William Willett’s 1907 pamphlet “Waste of Daylight” asked for 80 minutes, advanced 20 minutes on each of four Sundays in April and given back the same way on four Sundays in September. Parliament passed its act on May 17, 1916, and the country moved its clocks four days later, on May 21. An hour is a convention rather than a measurement of anything, in the same way that the em dash takes its name from the width of a printer’s metal type.

Law	The daylight saving window it set
Standard Time Act, 1918	Last Sunday in March to last Sunday in October
Repeal, 1919	None nationally, local option only
Uniform Time Act, 1966	Last Sunday in April to last Sunday in October
Energy Policy Act, 2005	Second Sunday in March to first Sunday in November

NIST puts the current window at 238 days, about 65% of the year, running from 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday in March to 2:00 a.m. on the first Sunday in November. Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and Arizona sit it out, with the Navajo Nation inside Arizona the exception that keeps it.

Even that is short of the two spells when the clocks never went back at all. Congress ran daylight saving year round as War Time from 1942 until the last Sunday in September 1945, and tried it again from January 6, 1974 to April 27, 1975.

The fuel case that started everything has never quite closed either. A Department of Energy study of the extended window found it cut national electricity consumption by 0.03 percent in 2007, which works out at roughly 0.02 percent of all the energy the United States used that year.

So the complaint that arrives every March has the wrong defendant. The farm lobby’s position was firm enough to break a wartime statute and beat a sitting president, and the only piece of that law still standing is the reason a call from Boston to Denver crosses two hours. Strictly FYI.