On 29 October, the superstitious annual ritual known as Daylight Saving Time ended in Europe, and for my American readers it will end this coming Sunday, on 5 November. For half or more of every year, we collectively pretend that it is one hour later than it actually is, even though doing so is entirely pointless and serves merely to increase stress and confusion.
There is a charming Anglophone tradition of crediting Benjamin Franklin with the invention of everything, and DST is often laid at the feet of this poor man. The accusations are unjust. Franklin’s crime was merely penning a sarcastic takedown of Parisian nightlife in 1784, in which he suggested that the revelling citizens of that city might spare much lamp oil if only they would go to bed earlier.
The true inventor DST was an entomologist named George Vernon Hudson, who wanted more daylight on summer evenings to facilitate his after-work bug collecting. In 1895, Hudson presented a paper proposing a summer-time programme of setting clocks two hours forward to the Wellington Philosophical Society, and he was justly ridiculed for his idiocy. One respondent called his idea “wholly unscientific and impracticable,” while another pointed out that “the mere calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time.” (A certain Mr. Richardson, however, channeling Franklin, “said that it would be a good thing if the plan could be applied to the young people.”) Hudson published his proposal in 1898, and ultimately won a British builder named William Willett to the cause of making time itself something for bureaucrats to fiddle with. Willett spent a few eccentric years campaigning to set clocks 80 minutes forward in four incremental steps every April, and then to walk back these bizarre adjustments in September. He attracted the attention of some politicians, including Winston Churchill, but he died of influenza before the scheme went any further.
DST became a reality only in 1916, when Germany and Austria-Hungary imposed the time shift as a wartime fuel-saving measure. So as not to lose any advantage, the United Kingdom imposed DST on its population weeks later, and the United States followed suit upon its late entry into the conflict in 1918. Even in those early days, there was considerable doubt that DST would have any meaningful influence on energy consumption, particularly in heavily regulated wartime economies. Evidence since then suggests that in peacetime it probably causes slight increases in electricity usage, as it involves a trade-off of less energy-intensive lighting for more energy-intensive heating and cooling.
Alas, such practical considerations have never mattered. The Great War cemented DST as an economising measure in the popular consciousness. While most countries ended the practice after 1918, basically everybody reintroduced the ritual in World War II. Germany set the clocks ahead on 1 April 1940, and did not bother setting them back again until 2 November 1942. Thereafter the National Socialists remembered to lift summer time every Fall until their defeat in 1945, when the occupiers assumed control of the clocks for them. After the Hungerwinter of 1946/7, they even imposed a “double summer time” of two hours in May, but reduced this to the traditional single hour seven weeks later. In 1949, both newly founded German states agreed to end the practice entirely, as did the rest of postwar Europe.
DST functions like a jurisdictional contagion. Anybody can introduce it for any stupid reason at all, thereby forcing all of their neighbours to swallow the chaos of misaligned clocks or follow along. It was France that brought DST back to Europe in 1976, in response to the oil crisis. Thus the twice-annual ritual of pointless clock adjustments returned to the Continent, this time not even to save energy, but simply to avoid confusion in flight times and train time tables. Switzerland was the last to succumb to the modern DST cult in 1981. Now that we are in this situation, it seems impossible to get out of it. In 2018, the European Commission opened an online survey to solicit citizens’ opinions on DST. The overwhelming majority of all respondents said they wanted to end the practice, and the European Parliament accordingly voted to abolish DST in 2019. Member states were set to decide from 2021 whether they would opt for permanent normal or permanent summer time. The deadline came and went and nothing has changed, because our politicians fear the confusion of fragmenting time on the Continent, and some believe abolishing DST would require a broader reconsideration of European time zones.
