The History of Daylight Saving Time: From Ben Franklin to Modern Law

Daylight Saving Time (DST) is the practice of advancing clocks during the warmer months so that evening daylight lasts longer at the cost of an earlier sunrise. In the United States it now runs from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November, but the idea is far older — and far stranger — than most people realize.

The legend of Benjamin Franklin

The story often begins in 1784, when Benjamin Franklin — then living in Paris — wrote a satirical essay suggesting that Parisians could save enormous sums on candles if they simply rose earlier and used morning sunlight. He proposed firing cannons at sunrise to wake the city. Franklin never seriously proposed changing the clocks, but the anecdote stuck, and he is frequently (and incorrectly) credited with inventing DST.

World War I and the first national laws

The first real implementation came from wartime necessity. Germany introduced DST on April 30, 1916, to conserve coal during World War I. Britain and many other European nations followed within weeks. The United States adopted DST in 1918 with the Standard Time Act, but it was repealed the next year after the war ended — farmers had never wanted it, and the public found the twice-yearly shift confusing.

Daylight Saving Time returned during World War II and was even kept year-round as 'War Time' between 1942 and 1945.

The chaos before the Uniform Time Act

After the war, DST became a patchwork. States, cities, and even individual businesses set their own start and end dates. By 1965, the United States had a bewildering mix of overlapping schedules — one famous example found a 35-mile bus ride through Ohio and West Virginia that required passengers to change their watches seven times.

The Uniform Time Act of 1966

Congress finally stepped in with the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which established a single national DST schedule: the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October. States were allowed to opt out entirely (as Arizona and Hawaii still do), but they could no longer pick their own dates. The law has been amended several times since — most notably the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which moved the start earlier to March and the end later to November, beginning in 2007.

Key dates in US DST history

• 1918 — First national DST under the Standard Time Act
• 1942–1945 — Year-round 'War Time' during WWII
• 1966 — Uniform Time Act standardizes the schedule
• 1974 — Year-round DST during the energy crisis
• 2007 — Current March-to-November schedule takes effect

Today the debate continues. The Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act in 2022 to make DST permanent, but it has not become law. Until it does, Americans will keep springing forward and falling back — a ritual born from candle budgets and wartime coal shortages that somehow outlasted both.