Early this Sunday at 12 am, many Americans will be setting their clocks ahead one hour as the official daylight saving time (DST) returns. However, many people here in the U.S. are unaware why we change our clocks forward at this time of year.
Contrary to popular belief, this is not done for farmers or just so we get an extra hour of sunlight in the evening as we head into the spring. The reality is that farmers are the number one critics of changing the time, and people’s biological clocks get thrown out of whack for weeks when their bodies have to forcibly adjust to this unnatural time change.
The true reason why we have daylight saving time is because of war and saving the governments money. It is also a more friendly alternative phrase to the original meaning which was “War Time.”
We had begun this practice under the Standard Time Act of 1918 as part of the US War Time Act during World War I, a wartime measure to conserve energy resources and fuel.
We Americans actually got the idea from the Germans who started daylight saving time on April 30, 1916, in order to conserve electricity during the war. Just a few months later, the United Kingdom followed suit by introducing “summer time, ” and in America in 1918 War Time was officially instituted into law.
One of our nation’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin had written a satirical essay in 1784 which he calculated that the regime of the Parisian warriors marching through Paris could save the modern-day equivalent of $200 million for the economy simply by waking up at dawn.
That is a heck of a lot of money the government saves by changing the time. I imagine they must save billions of dollars today.
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
official daylight saving time (DST) returns. However, many people here in the U.S. are unaware why we change our clocks forward at this time of year.
