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What's the reason for Daylight Savings Time?
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Blue-DST, Red-No DST, Orange-used to, but no longer recognizes DST
We set our clocks back one hour this past weekend as we moved off of daylight savings time and back onto standard time. While admittedly, falling back is much easier than springing ahead, many people struggle with the time change. It's only an hour but it creates all sorts of problems from the sun being in the “wrong” place on daily commutes to simply feeling out of sync for a week or so until the body adjusts.
So whose idea was Daylight Savings Time and why do we follow it? The short answers are “Benjamin Franklin’s” and “to save energy”. Franklin reasoned that by adjusting the clocks so that more daylight fell in the afternoon that people would use less energy, allowing the sunlight to do what it does best, that is, heat and light the workplace and home.
Does it actually do what it was intended to do? The short answer is no, it doesn’t. At Franklin's time, the US was primarily an agrarian nation and technology was limited. The productive portion of the day was, to a large extent, limited to daylight hours. Today we're often up before the sun and don't retire until well after it sets, regardless of what the clock says. We use lighting in the morning and in the evening, so it doesn’t matter when the sun actually rises and sets. Ironically, many people now say the biggest beneficiaries of daylight savings time are retailers and other businesses who see an increase in sales due to longer daylight hours in the evening.
So why do we keep it if there's no real benefit? That's a good question. Many of the nations of the world that previously followed daylight savings time no longer do. This list includes most of Latin America, Asia, north Africa and most of the provinces of Australia. These are the orange areas on the map that accompanies this article. The blue areas still follow daylight savings time. The red areas never did. Perhaps the day will come when we no longer follow it as well.
