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Editorial: Time to turn back the clocks

November 1, 2019   ·   0 Comments

NOW THAT DAYLIGHT Saving Time sees most of us getting up in the dark, Sunday will give us, an albeit brief, respite with the return to Standard Time until next March.

Although it won’t be until 2 a.m. Sunday that the changeover will officially take place, we suspect that most local residents will turn back their clocks before going to bed Saturday night.

According to Wikipedia, New Zealand entomologist George Hudson first proposed modern Daylight Saving Time (DST) in 1895. Many publications credit the DST proposal to prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett, who independently conceived DST in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride when he observed how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day.

Port Arthur, Ontario,  was the first city in the world to enact DST, on July 1, 1908. It was followed by Orillia, Ontario, introduced by William Sword Frost while mayor from 1911 to 1912.

The first nation states to adopt DST were in the German Empire and Austria-Hungary in 1916, as a way to conserve coal during wartime. Britain and most of its allies soon followed. Russia and a few other countries waited until the next year, and the United States adopted daylight saving in 1918. 

DST became common during World War II, and was widely adopted as a result of the 1970s energy crisis. 

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