Hello March

Daylight Savings Time is Sunday, March 14 but how did daylight savings come to be? First, many wrongfully credit Benjamin Franklin or the agricultural industry or farmers. In fact, the man who came up with daylight savings time was William Willett of England back in 1905. He pushed for the United Kingdom to adopt summer time so they could take advantage of the sunlight but he died before the U.K. adopted his ideology. The first country to adopt daylight savings time was Germany during World War I and they used Willett’s recommendations. On April 30, 1916, the U.K. adopted summer time a few weeks after the Germans. In the U.S., daylight savings time was first used on March 31, 1918, as a wartime measure. Farmers and the agriculture industry were against it as they used the sun and not the clock to dictate what they did, and under daylight savings, they fell behind shipping schedules as they had to wait for the dew to evaporate to harvest hay, cows were not ready to be milked, and hired hands worked less since they left at the same for dinner. Daylight savings time was repealed after World War I and brought back in World War II, then it became a mess as each city in each state chose if and when they wanted to implement it. Meaning some states had different daylight savings times for each city. In 1966, the Uniform Time Act standardized daylight savings time and allowed every state to choose to follow it or remain on standard time year-round. To this day only Hawaii, Arizona, the Navajo Nations, and U.S. territories do not observe it.