When daylight saving time (DST) begins in the spring, many people throughout the world move their clocks forward one hour, and they turn them back in the fall. British builder William Willett was among the first to take the idea of changing the clock seasonally seriously. He had seen that not many people were out in the early morning hours of the summer, and his golf matches frequently finished early as the sky got black. However, his concept operated somewhat differently from the common “spring forward” and “fall back” time adjustments seen today.
Willett said, “The sun shines upon the land for several hours each day while we are asleep, and is rapidly nearing the horizon, having already passed its western limit, when we reach home after the work of the day is over,” in his self-published pamphlet “The Waste of Daylight,” which was released in 1907. He recommended, and we still do, turning back the clocks on Sundays at two in the morning during the spring and fall in order to make the most of the daylight hours. However, in contrast to today, the shift was scheduled to occur twice a year for a total of eight time shifts, lasting 20 minutes at a time over four weeks. Moreover, there would be an 80-minute time difference instead of an even hour. In 1908, Willett’s plan was discussed in the British House of Commons, but it was roundly mocked and rejected. Ten years later, during World War I, several nations were searching for innovative methods to reduce spending. Influenced by Willett’s first proposition, which featured projected electrical cost savings, Germany and Britain instituted “Summer Time” in 1916, adjusting the clocks by an hour just twice a year. On March 31, 1918, the United States began observing daylight saving time.
