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March 11, 2019

Daylight Saving Time

BS 2018Did you remember to "spring ahead" on Sunday? This weekend marked the start of daylight saving time. So while you lost an hour of sleep, you gained an extra hour of daylight.

Benjamin Franklin wasn't only the discoverer of electricity, he was also the inventor of Daylight Savings Time. In 1874, Franklin was the U.S. ambassador to Paris, and he wrote a letter suggesting that "the sun gives light as soon as it rises" and that Parisians were wasteful with their night-owl habits.

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Today's Random Fact:

Daylight Savings Time officially began in 1916 when the Germans, in the middle of World War I, realized that they could save energy by switching the clocks. England's Parliament had rejected such a measure since 1909, but followed the Germans a month later. In the United States, DST began in 1918, when the US entered the war, but it was repealed once the war ended.

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The United States instituted DST again during World War II, one month after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. When the war ended, it was again repealed, although some states and cities chose to maintain the time change. This resulted in utter chaos as neighboring districts were followed different times. Suburbs could be in different time zones than the cities they surrounded.



Bonus Fact:

The Uniform Time Act of 1966 normalized the time change across the country. It decreed that states did not have to comply with the time change, but that if they did, the entire state must comply; cities and towns could not make the decision individually. The federal government chose which would be the "spring forward" and the "fall back" days.