How Daylight Saving Time Works

Benjamin Franklin first came up with daylight saving time in 1748, and people still practice it today. But how does it work? What are the pros and cons? Join Josh and Chuck as they turn back the clock to explore the origins of daylight saving time.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles Tufy, Chuck Bryant. He's on his iPhone. Chuck,
I don't know, uh that makes this stuff you should know?

(00:21):
Huh the fully attentive podcast. You're saying, Yeah, I can't
really say anything. You always say stuff and then I
repeat it like thirty seconds later and then get a
look of death from Chuck. We'd like to cover our
basis twice. Sometimes it's important stuff like you know, um,
the digestion. That's right, good thing which comes out next? Right?

(00:47):
All right? Introman, Oh, I'm sorry? Am I am I stalling? Yeah? Okay, frankly, Chuck,
have you ever heard of a methuselah? Trust? No, but
of something being old? Uh, well you're not old. Instead,
a say, a bequeathment grant that you've put in a

(01:10):
an account earning compound interest for five hundred or a
thousand or a hundred years, should conceivably, were it's still legal,
grow into a staggering amount of money, very like, very quickly.
For example, Um, there was a guy who you might

(01:31):
have heard of named Ben Franklin Benny Ben Franklin Uh
in his will left a thousand pounds each to the
city of Boston in the city of Philadelphia, both of
which he considered his hometowns UM and these these monies
were meant to stay in a private trust that earned

(01:51):
compound interests, and by Franklin's reckoning, um within so after
a hundred years in eighteen nine that it was supposed
to be cracked open, a bit was supposed to be
taken out, and then the rest was supposed to be
left in until nine years after his death. So by
his reckoning it would each city would get about the

(02:13):
equivalence six million dollars apiece UH by nine, which is
when it was supposed to and and finally mature. UM.
It didn't quite work out. Franklin's calculations didn't take into
account lawsuits to stop this, to stop the idea of
him enthuselah trust in general, UM, trustees, fees, lawyers, fees,

(02:34):
all this stuff. So what it came down to was
about three and a half million each. So he's off
the market a little bit. But he made his point,
which was, if you put a grand in and you
have enough foresight, you can give some money to the
city of Boston. Did that really happen? Yeah, they got there,
They got their three and a half mill Yeah each
townded Um. What this demonstrate is probably more than anything, though,

(02:56):
is that Franklin was, above all else, an idea man. Right.
He was pretty good. I mean, he invented spectacles. He
had like some really good uh some good inventions under
his belt, the electric kite. But more than anything else,
he was all about ideas. And he was more aware
than anybody that his ideas weren't always he didn't see

(03:17):
him through to fruition all the time. Not not all
ideas were meant to be. But another good example of
that is his idea for daylight savings time. He was
the guy that came up with this saving daylight saving time.
I think most people say savings, but it is in
fact saving. But we're gonna mess up and say savings.

(03:37):
So yeah, just prepare for that, s people. Franklin was
an ambassador to France, which is a pretty crushed job
back then. I'm sure the Enlightenment. Come on, it's his
job now. Um. Woke up one morning all this uh
fellow Parisians were sleeping and he said, hey, we should

(04:01):
change the time and get these people up earlier. Did
he talk like he was from Jersey. He basically proposed
it in an article, but it's generally dismissed his satire.
But it wasn't a real idea, right. His whole idea
was to um that basically everybody was like sleeping in
light while it was still daylight and then staying up

(04:22):
late long after sunset. It was a waste of daylight.
A great way to fix this is to say, let's
get everybody up at the crack of dawn, and we'll
do that by shooting off cannons that wake everybody up.
It was sort of a jab at the French, a
friendly jab. Well, he was a friend of the French,
but like I said, generally dismissed his satire. Not really

(04:43):
like the seed of the idea for daylight saving. No.
But other people about a hundred or so years later
came up with similar things and they meant it. And
it's I don't know if we can say that Franklin
didn't mean it, but he was just he He didn't
think it was a very important idea necessary, but it's
so ingrained in our society here in the United States,

(05:04):
here in North America, and most likely if you're listening
to this in Europe or Australia. You know what we're
talking about all over the world. Really, um that it
You're you're kind of like, oh yeah, daylight savings. I mean,
it's peculiar, but of course we're gonna do it. Of
course it makes sense. Um, these this is from people
who really can't even tell you whether it's spring forward

(05:25):
or fall back. So let's let's set that straight right now,
because I think if we just stopped there and said
it is spring forward where you said the clock forward
an hour, and it's fall back where you said the
clock back an hour, we've just done a tremendous public service.
People really not remember that. I'm among them. Really, yeah,

(05:46):
I will always remember it now because I've studied this article.
But no, I always had trouble with it. Well, that's
why they say spring forward, fall back. You can also
fall forward and spring back. You can't spring back. I
can't hold on, Josh, Josh, just sprung back, sprung back.

(06:07):
All right, Well, here's the other public service announcement here
in the US. Second Sunday in March. You're gonna spring
forward the first Sunday in November, you're gonna fall back.
I didn't know that, because every year I'm on the
internet's going, well, when do we do this? When do
we do it? I didn't. I thought it fluctuated. Second
Sunday in March, first Sunday in November. Boom. Yeah, I

(06:28):
thought it fluctuated as well too. It's yeah, um, it's
standard now thanks to a lot of UM legislation that's
taken place over the over the years here in the
United States. UM. Most recently, the Energy Policy Act of
two thousand five set the rules as you just described them. Right.

(06:49):
We should also say, chuck to our friends in South America,
you have the opposite. We're not exactly sure when it
starts for you, but we can tell you that you
do spring forward and fall back. No, fall forward and
spring back, because it's the the seasons are the opposite.
So they go on to daylight savings time in the

(07:13):
fall and then change it. They go off of it
in the spring. And also one more thing, uh, daylight
saving time, right is not? I find it confusing in
that the mind wants to say it's it's like daylight
time saving it's like daylight saving time, right, like your

(07:37):
time saving but really it's daylight saving time, so it's
like a period of the year. So I've always had
trouble wrapping my mind around how they're just saving daylight.
Everything about this is so confounding. I know, because I'm
one of those people that's like what the clock says
is arbitrary in a way. Unless you have a shift job, Um,

(08:00):
you would have made a great farmer. Yeah. That's kind
of bunk too from what I hear. Okay, so let's
talk about this, man Um. You just gave the deets
on when to do it. Um. In the United States,
it's the Energy Policy Act of two thousand five that
establishes that. But if you are Arizona or Hawaii or

(08:21):
Guam and you say, I don't want this to apply
to me already feel cut off enough from this country, Um,
from the rest of the world. I'm going to apply
for an exemption. You're probably gonna get it. Yeah. Indiana
has had a mixed history with daylight saving Uh. They've

(08:42):
kind of fluctuated back and forth over the years, and
at times only some counties had it and some didn't,
And they finally went all in I think so recently. Yeah,
if you're an Indiana, you know what I'm talking about. Um,
And it's not just the United States. Apparently, as a
two thousand and eight, seventy six countries observed daylight savings time.

(09:04):
They also seventy, but I don't know which sources newer,
so we'll go with seventy to seventy six. Just after
reading this, I could see six countries falling. Yeah, I
mean it's a very it's a surprisingly contentious thing setting
the clock back an hour basically. I saw one source
that calls it the arrogance of humanity to to set

(09:27):
time period. Yeah, well no, to adjust the clock. It's
like it is now two and not one, right exactly,
And it is a little bit loony if you think
about it. Um. I think Japan, India, and China are
the only major industrialized nations who do not observe. And
it's getting more and more difficult to to um be

(09:49):
a country like that in this globalized world to not
daylight savings something. I mean, it's kind of problematic. Sure, yeah,
imagine the that's why most countries do it now, well
not most, but a lot. So Europe has long observed
what's called summertime. Um. But it wasn't until that the

(10:10):
EU said hey, let's all just stop this patchwork thing.
Here's the standards now, um and it's uh. The European
Union says it runs from daylight saving time, the time
of daylight saving summertime. Yeah, it's the last Sunday in
March to the last Sunday in October. That's the the EU. Yeah,

(10:33):
good for them. No. Um. We you mentioned earlier that

(11:04):
another couple of guys that proposed this. Um. One of
them was a New Zealander named George Vernon Hudson, and
he was actually the first dude to genuinely propose this,
and he gets overlooked a lot of time by the
other guy we'll talk about. But Hudson was an entomologist

(11:26):
and astronomer and he had a shift job that allowed
him I guess he worked at night because allowed him
extra daylight hours that his friends weren't getting. He go
out and hunt for bugs and he was like this
is great. He's like, we ought to really try and
do this. But William Willett of England is the guy
that a lot of people credit with it, and I

(11:47):
think it's because it was kind of his passion in life,
Like he really really tried to get this push through. Yeah,
he was an avid golfer. And his whole premise for
it was that it would extend time for leisure after work,
after everybody got done working for the day, they're still
daylight hours. The links um. And he wrote a pamphlet
that's online. It's called The Waste of Daylight. It's online

(12:10):
and its entirety if you search that um. And he
lobbied the House of Commons to institute this, and in
nineteen o eight they officially said nah. But he kept
lobbying him until his death. And I think the twenties
died in nineteen fifteen actually, so he did not get
to see it because a year later, insultingly enough, a

(12:32):
year later it was it was brought on in England
thanks to a little something called World War One. Yeah,
and actually it was Germany that was the first country
to ever institute daylight savings time. Yeah. They called it
wartime though, Yeah, so did FDR later on. Yeah. Um,
but the Germans, the Germans started it. The English quickly

(12:52):
saw the value and it and they started it. And
it was all the preserved coal supplies during the war, um,
because if you or were up earlier, you'd be tired
earlier and you wouldn't stay up as late earning precious
coal needed to pound the Kaiser into oblivion. That's right.
And uh, a lot of a lot of nations got
on board because of World War One, thirty one in total,

(13:16):
including the US, and then World War Two. Well after
the war, I think most of these countries got rid
of it. It was just for war. And then World
War two came around, the same thing happened, but in
more abundance. Fifty two nations this time. Right in the
US actually kept daylight savings year round for three full
years uninterrupted, from what is it February September. And apparently

(13:43):
FDR he called it wartime too. He had no problem
with it. He was just going to leave it like
that indefinitely. Um. And he finally acquiesced to farmers, which, um,
if you know much about farmers at that era, they
were really a active at striking, overturning like um scab trucks,

(14:04):
and like dealing with communists and like being pro communist um.
And they were a force to be reckoned with. They
called it God's time did they really. Yeah, we'll talk
more about the farmers in a minute. UM. Go on. Uh, well,
we we had it for three years solid, like you said,
and then after the war they said, you know what,
you don't have to do it, but it's up to

(14:26):
your state if you want to keep doing this or not.
Some did, some didn't. So that's the history. Actually, no,
it keeps going in nineteen sixty six. History does keep going,
doesn't it. So the states are it's all patchwork and
everybody's just kind of doing what however they want. But
we have this thing called the Interstate system that comes about,
which links states more and more and there's more trade,

(14:49):
and really people need to know what time it is
in another state that they're sending stuff to UM. So
the Uniform Time Act of nineteen sixty six finally said
you guys can decide whether you want to do it,
but if you're gonna do it, you have to do
it along these guidelines. UM. And it stayed that way
uninterrupted until except for the arab Um oil embargo, where

(15:13):
the US said, you know, we're gonna extend the daylight
savings to UM through winter as well. Yeah, I went
from six months to eight months uh in nineteen seventy
three because they found that doing so saved the equivalent
of ten thousand barrels of oil a day in six

(15:34):
hundred thousand in those two years. So that's what they
said it is Is it true? Who knows about that?
Definitely up for debate. Whether it's say, ten thousand barrels
of oil a day, I'm sure it's for debate. The
weird thing about daylight savings is it's largely been intuitive

(15:55):
for decades. It was practiced for decades before anybody finally
put it to the test. Well, the whole point behind
it is this chuck that there are more people asleep
at sunrise and more businesses are closed at sunrise than
at sunset. So if you look at electrical demand right um,
as a whole over the course of a single day,

(16:17):
you're gonna see in the afternoon, in the evening it
starts to peak if you take an hour. If you
take the whole day and shift it backward by an hour,
people are gonna get up earlier, and it's going to
spread that electrical demand over the day. They're also gonna
go to bed earlier, so they're gonna use lamps less
they're gonna stay up less late to watch TV. UM,
so the overall demand should decrease to And this is

(16:41):
the whole reason that daylight savings time has always been
UM kind of championed by most people. That's the whole
reason that they want you to think, Well, that's part
of it. The other is to get people outside more. Yeah.
I mean I read up on this and what I
found out was that it really comes down to money.
They want you to to spend the money more. Yeah, and

(17:02):
that is going to happen more if you're out and
about chopping or playing golf, exactly like the golf lobby
in eighty six, the last time before two five, then
anybody tinker with it, Reagan said in Public Law and
ninety nine he started at the first Sunday in April,
which was where before in nineteen sixty six it was

(17:24):
from the last Sunday in April, so a full month
he added to daylight savings time. Um. But the golf
Lobby said that an extra month or an extra hour.
I think an extra month was like four million dollars
to just that industry alone. I don't know seither. Yeah,
money talks, uh. And the reason I say that that's

(17:46):
the main reason is because they've done studies and in fact,
in seventy three when they did the oil embargo, they
didn't just study oil barrels, they studied utilities and they
found that it's a pretty negligible difference about one percent
energy savings. But that's for the whole country. That's a lot.
That is a substantial amount of that's a lot. See

(18:10):
I read it's negligible. So say so, say it is
one percent, Say it is negligible, but say that it's
zero percent. If you don't do anything, you automatically have said,
well there's a there's a savings and energy, especially in
this eco conscious society that we're growing into. Um, that's
it right there, Okay, daylight saving time, do it. You

(18:32):
will save one percent of all the energy expended. Fine,
do it. It's better than not right. What else could
possibly go wrong? And I was very surprised from this
article to find that there's actually counter arguments todaylight saving time. Well, yeah,
because they basically I think people have challenge the studies.
That's what I've seen. In two thousand one, they did

(18:52):
another study the California did where they actually doubled it
to a two hour shift and in the end they
found it, uh, electricity savings of about point oh three
for the year, right, which is substantially less, But you
can also say it's still better than nothing. Why not
just do it. There's also other arguments to things like, um,

(19:16):
there's fewer traffic accidents in the evenings because it's lighter out,
that's what they say on the evening commute. Um, crime
is decreased because criminals preferred darkness. And if you're out
taking a walk after work and it's light out still,
you're probably not going to get mugged. Um. And then
of course the golf industry said everybody needs to get

(19:37):
off their rears and get outside and play more golf,
golf fever catch it, and um, they are big on
that as well. Well, I got most of my info
you should know from that Skeptward guy. Let's hear it, Dunning, Well, no,
that's what he said. He said, basically, it's all about money.
He said, don't be foolded into thinking this is some
energy plan. And he said that the numbers are suspect.

(20:00):
And then it really comes down to spending money as
a as a consumer. I'm sure it does. But the other.
The other aspect of it, the you know who's the
biggest against it now these days? They used to be farmers. Well,
he said, that's bunked too. He bunks everything though. So
here's the thing farmers. From what I understand it used
to be farmers. And I've seen this elsewhere that farmers

(20:22):
had a problem with it because daylight savings added a
day and an hour under their day. They had to
get up with the with the at the crack of dawn,
no matter what time it was. So if it was
actually if they had an extra hour, they had to
extend their business hours because they had to deal with
the public who was running on an hour later time.
So farmers hated daylight savings and they railed against it.

(20:42):
That's my understanding with modern technology that that where a
lot of the farm processes are automated, they don't have
to worry about the the sun time or God's time
as much. They're not as opposed to it. The problem
is with airlines now when they're flying to places that

(21:03):
don't have daylight savings, they apparently have a lot more
trouble getting a slot at an airport when the time
doesn't quite match up because the airport's like, we're not
going to the trouble of figuring this out. Go lobby
your government to stop screwing with time. So apparently that's
the big industry that's opposed daylight savings right now. Interesting. Yeah, um,

(21:23):
like I said, though, he's that's his job. He's the
skeptalid debunking. He said. The farmer thing is he thinks
is somewhat of a myth because he can't find any
He said, all the sources are the exact same and
he can't find any like origin source that he thinks
is valid. That's a that's pretty good evidence that something
is a myth. But he's trying to prove a negative.

(21:45):
He should be opposed to that. Maybe he is. Huh
m hm uh. There was a new study though, um

(22:20):
recently by a guy named Matthew Coaching. He's an economist
at cal Goberts and um, you know, I said, Indiana
has kind of been back and forth over the years,
with like half the state doing it. When they finally
went all in and oh six, he said, hey, it's
a great opportunity to check this out and study it.
And he found that it led to a one percent rise.

(22:44):
He figured that lamp usage went down overall across the
daylight savings, but that there was a peak in energy
demand that was an increase over when you don't observe
daylight savings in the fall when it was cold in
Indiana in the form of heating, like people had their
heat went up because they weren't under the blankets as

(23:06):
early right as when they when they just observe standard
time year round. And that actually cost nine million dollars
for the state. Well, I think that's part of dunning
thing too, is these studies that were done in the seventies,
they didn't have you know, computers and iPods and Blu
ray players, and we have way more things besides lamps
these days to take into account, and air conditioners and

(23:29):
things like that. So he's saying it's kind of an
outdated there are no lamps in the seventies and outdated
model the U and daylight savings. Chuck also kind of
strikes me as like a really good example of for
every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction, So like
there's fewer fender benders during the evening commute, But apparently

(23:50):
parents are also like parents groups are also a post
daylight savings in part because kids accidents involving kids waiting
for the bus in the dark or mornings increase, and
then crime goes down during the summer, but then it
increases in the fall. Now there's no there's no figures
to support that necessarily. But there's also the only study

(24:13):
ever conducted about how daylight savings creates a decrease in
crime was a single study of the District District of
Columbia in the seventies that found a ten percent reduction,
but no one's ever backed it up. Yeah, well, and
think about it too. Carrex are good for industries like
tow trucks and mechanics, the toe truck lobby, auto industry

(24:39):
that wants to sell you a new bumper. I don't know,
but it does everything. You're right, Everything hasn't an opposite reaction.
And also apparently chronobiologically, it can be very problematic for us.
So says was he German? Yeah, I didn't see his name.
He's just referred to as a German chronobiology. I couldn't
find him or her. Yeah, that's true. He or she

(25:02):
says that your body never even adjusts period to the
circadian rhythm and so you're just out of whack for
eight months out of the year, or I guess it
depends on which one he thinks is right. So yeah,
and the big problem is going back and back, like
going back and forth. Like if we all just said, okay,

(25:22):
the whole world's gonna set their clocks back one hour
forever and that will be referred to from here on
out as the hour the moment, and then we're just
gonna forget about daylight saving time, it would conceivably have
the same effect, right, but it would not have that
jet lag problem that the German chronobiologist describes. Um and
even worse, there's other people that propose um it extended

(25:46):
daylight savings through throughout the throughout the year or throughout
the winner as well. Right, if we did that once
eight could conceivably be fine. Our bodies could adjust. It's
going back and forth. Other people are proposed double daylight savings,
where you go back two hours, which would probably reak
havoc if are if the chronobiologist is correct, and there's

(26:09):
actually data that supports this idea that like our bodies
are disrupted by it, like the Swedish heart attack study. Yeah,
I'm sure they are. I never thought of it as
losing an hour though, because it happened at two am
on Sunday and I would just wake up and whatever
the clock said is what it said. Yeah, I never
felt like, you know, I guess I don't get up
Sunday morning at seven for a shift job. No, that's

(26:31):
a big part of it. I saw in the consumers
some guy wanted to know about getting paid um on
because he worked at a late night on November this
past November for Sunday in November when he had an
extra hour, because there's actually twenty five hours in that day.
One one am is counted twice. Interesting, isn't that there's

(26:52):
a twenty five hour day that we just went through.
That's got to mess us up somehow, And it does.
The Swedish study I was referring to found that since
seven the number of heart attacks rose about five percent
during the first week of daylight savings time every year.
And then Australia, some Australians looked at some data between
nineteen and two thousand one and found that male suicides

(27:15):
increase um in the weeks following daylight savings time. And
they're controlling for everything else and it appears to just
be daylight savings really affects people with bipolar disorder and
they are more men are more prone. Australian men with
bipolar disorder are more prone to commit suicide in the
weeks immediately preceding the change over to daylight saving. That's

(27:40):
sad It is sad um. There have been some kind
of interesting things that happened over the years because of
d ST and nine nine the West Bank was on
daylight savings. Israel had just switched back to standard time.
So a group of West Bank terrorists were preparing some
time bombs, smuggled them to their counterparts in Israel, and

(28:03):
as they were planning the bombs, they blew up. No, yes, no,
it's what it says. Is that from skeptid No is
that from Snopes. They'll take snokes too. I think I
think that's real. Wow. I think that happened. Minneapolis and St.
Paul were on different, uh, different times in which kind

(28:24):
of whack things out am track. A train cannot leave
the station before it's scheduled to obviously, can't leave early
because everyone's gonna get on. So when you fall back
in October, if you're running on time, you stop and
sit there for an hour November. What I say October.
I think it used to be in October when when

(28:45):
this was written. So you sit there for an extra
hour if you're on amtrack on that day, that's right,
that's crazy. And then in the spring, apparently they don't
do anything but try and catch up, like everything's a
little late for a little while, and they just try
to like ride faster. Can you imagine being a low logistician.
I want to hear from logisticians. I have a deep

(29:06):
respect for your profession. Yeah, I agreed, that's tough stuff.
Time who knew? You know? Is it arbitrary? What the
clock says? It's just a number. I tend to go
with just the rise and fall of the sun and moon.
You know, are you kidding me? Like you could throw
away every clock in the world and nothing would really change.

(29:28):
And you know in uncivilized parts of the world and
the civilized world everything runs on the clock. But it's
just time. The number was invented by man. I know
what you mean. Man, you know what I'm saying, abstract.
Thanks for that, Chuck. I think that was an excellent
way to kind of put everybody the sleep. You just

(29:49):
put them on a little cloud and went yeah. Man,
you know, Um, if you want to learn more about clouds,
about daylight savings, time, about Chuck Brian, you can type
in those words in any search bar at how stuff
works dot com and will bring up some very cool stuff,
I assure you. Um, and I said search bar how
stuff works dot com. That means it's time Chuck for listeners.

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to enter as far as I know. Yeah, I think so.
But if you refer someone um and they win, I'm sorry.
After person a enters the contest, he or she can
share the contest link with friends via Facebook and Twitter,
and if a friend of their's winds, then you win
a kindle fire. That's not too shabby. Does that make sense? Yeah?

(32:07):
And I would. I would give you the link, but
it's like three thousand characters long. So just go to Facebook,
how Stuff Work, How Stuff Works dot com, how stuff
Works official Facebook page yea, and you will find the
information there and lunch, lunch it up with us. Yeah,
let's lunch. Let's do lunch before we go. I wanna

(32:27):
correct myself big time. Correct myself about patent trolls. In
the gene patents Okay episode, I mentioned patent trolls and
I don't even remember what I said they were, but
I was way off. Yea. Patentrols are people who go
around buying patents with no intent of manufacturing these things

(32:49):
or what the patent is for. I figured that's what
it was like buying a website domains. Sure, but then
they sue. The whole point is to own the patent
so that they can sue anybody who infringes on it.
So basically they're keeping any kind of innovation from coming
about along the same lines of what they own the
patent to by suing people who try to do it.

(33:10):
And they're they're basically just whatever, this great idea that's
patented is just never going to see the light of
day because they have no interest in you and that
they just want the money from suing people that's a patentrol.
I apologize for to all the patentrols out there. Yes,
it's all the people who corrected me. Thank you for that. Yes. Uh.
If you want to correct us, we are always up
for that. You can send us a tweet at s

(33:33):
y ESK podcast. You can join us on Facebook. We
have our own page too. It's stuff you should know uh,
And you can also send us a good old fashioned email.
Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com For more
on this and thousands of other topics, does it how

(33:55):
stuff works dot com