No, Ben Franklin Did Not Invent Daylight Saving Time

alarm clock on autumn pumpkins background fall back concept
The Real History of Daylight Saving TimeCarol Yepes - Getty Images

The leaves are falling, and the days are growing shorter. That means one thing as we head into November: It’s almost time for Daylight Saving Time to end for the year. We will all set our clocks back one hour before going to bed on November 2 (or in the morning the next day) and “gain” an hour of sleep that night (woo-hoo!). Through the rest of fall and winter, we will have extra light for navigating to school and work in the morning, but there’s a tradeoff—it’ll get dark an hour earlier too.

So, why do we do this whole time shift, anyway? It turns out it’s way more complicated than you may think. Here’s what you need to know about “falling back” in November and “springing forward” next spring.

Daylight Saving Time ends for the year on Sunday, November 3, 2024.

Set your clocks! The change will take place at 2 a.m. on those fall and spring mornings. Daylight Saving Time always ends on the first Sunday in November and starts on the second Sunday in March the following spring (that’ll be March 9 in 2025).

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Why 2 a.m.?

The thought behind the early-morning swap is pretty simple: According to LiveScience, most people are expected to already be at home and in bed, and that time won’t bother many bars or restaurants. It also likely doesn’t affect those who have early shifts at work.

Wait: I thought it was Daylight Savings Time.

It sounds odd, but Daylight Saving Time is the correct phrasing. Still, the variation Daylight Savings Time is so common, it’s listed as an accepted variation in Merriam-Webster.

No, it wasn’t started to help farmers.

In fact, according to Time, the farm lobby campaigned aggressively against Daylight Saving Time. That’s because it gave them one less hour in the morning to milk their cows and send their crops to market. Farmers in the U.S. lobbied successfully to stop Daylight Saving Time after World War I, and it wouldn’t go back into effect until the next world war.

Benjamin Franklin didn’t invent it, either.

In 1784, Benjamin Franklin, who was then living in the French capital, published a satirical essay in the Journal de Paris. The topic? Parisians rising with the sun to save money on candles and lamp oil in the evenings. However, he was not seriously advocating for the practice as policy. According to The Franklin Institute, the credit (or blame) for inventing Daylight Saving Time actually goes to New Zealand entomologist, George Hudson, who presented the idea in 1895.

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It was first tried out officially in Europe.

Time reports that in 1907, William Willet wrote a book called The Waste of Daylight, arguing for a Daylight Saving Time. “The sun shines upon the land for several hours each day while we are asleep,” he wrote, but there “remains only a brief spell of declining daylight in which to spend the short period of leisure at our disposal.” Willet lobbied the British Parliament for the change, saying it would increase people’s enjoyment of sunlight and also save money on fuel, but it wasn’t passed in England until after his death—and then only after Germany became the first country to try it out in 1916.

The idea that DST conserves energy is dubious.

Between January 1974 and April 1975, the entire country went on Daylight Saving Time year-round to combat the energy crisis. In 2005, Congress passed a law that extended Daylight Saving Time by a month to keep energy costs down. The thinking behind these government mandates is that DST saves energy on lighting, but the theory doesn’t bear out. In fact, a 2008 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that DST raised energy bills for households in Indiana by 1 percent overall, adding up to an extra $9 million per year. The culprit: DST overlaps with the hottest months, and the time shift leads to increased cooling costs that outweigh savings on lighting.

It’s more recent in the U.S. than you think.

President Woodrow Wilson first made it law in 1918, but it was repealed seven months later, the Chicago Tribune reports. Though President Franklin D. Roosevelt relaunched it in 1942, the time change wasn’t official until 1966, when President Lyndon Johnson signed a law to make the start and end dates of Daylight Saving Time uniform across the country.

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Not everyone observes it.

Arizona (except for the Navajo Nation), Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands don’t recognize Daylight Saving Time. Parts of Indiana didn’t as well until it was adopted statewide in 2006. Several state legislatures have tried to abandon the time change in recent years. And around the world, only 70 countries actually observe it, according to CNN. A majority of U.S. states have considered legislation to permanently adopt Daylight Saving Time. In the last five years, 19 states have enacted legislation or passed resolutions in favor of year-round Daylight Saving Time: Colorado, Alabama, Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Idaho, Louisiana, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah, Wyoming, Delaware, Maine, Oregon, Tennessee, Washington, and Florida.

In March 2022, the Senate unanimously voted to pass the Sunshine Protection Act of 2021. The bill allows for moving time one hour forward from what the federal government considers standard time. If passed by the House, permanent DST would have started in November 2023. However, it’s now 2024 and the bill has yet to be passed by the House (and if it is passed, it will need to be signed into law by the President too).

It might be bad for your health.

According to The Atlantic, the time shift might be detrimental to people who suffer from seasonal affective disorder, a depression that kicks in when the seasons change. That’s because it changes your sleep cycle, and it turns out that change could even be linked to higher risks of heart attacks, car accidents, and even malfunctioning medical equipment.

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But it could cut down on crime.

A 2015 study by the Brookings Institute showed that when Daylight Saving Time begins in the spring, there is a drop robbery rates that day, especially during the early evening when people head home from work. The thinking is that the extra evening daylight serves as a deterrent.

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