Daylight savings time

Daylight savings time 

Daylight saving time (DST), also daylight 

savings time or daylight time (United States) and summer time (United Kingdom, European Union, and others), is the practice of advancing clocks during summer months so that darkness falls later each day according to the clock. A common implementation of DST is to advance clocks by one hour in the spring ("spring forward") and retard clocks by one hour in autumn ("fall back") to return to standard time. In other words, there is one 23-hour day in the spring and one 25-hour day in the fall.

George Hudson proposed the idea of daylight saving in 1895. The German Empire and Austria-Hungary organized the first nationwide implementation starting on April 30, 1916. Many countries have used it at various times since then, particularly since the 1970s energy crisis. DST is generally not observed near the equator, where sunrise times do not vary enough to justify it. Some countries observe it only in some regions; for example, parts of Australia observe it, while other parts do not.^] Only a minority of the world's population uses DST; Asia and Africa generally do not observe it.

DST clock shifts sometimes complicate timekeeping and can disrupt travel, billing, record keeping, medical devices, heavy equipment, and sleep patterns. Computer software often adjusts clocks automatically, but policy changes by various jurisdictions of DST dates and timings may be confusing.

Rationale

Industrialized societies usually follow a clock-based schedule for daily activities that do not change throughout the course of the year. The time of day that individuals begin and end work or school, and the coordination of mass transit, for example, usually remain constant year-round. In contrast, an agrarian society's daily routines for work and personal conduct are more likely governed by the length of daylight hours^[] and by solar time, which change seasonally because of the Earth's axial tilt. North and south of the tropics daylight lasts longer in summer and shorter in winter, with the effect becoming greater the further one moves away from the tropics.

By synchronously resetting all clocks in a region to one hour ahead of standard time, individuals who follow such a year-round schedule will wake an hour earlier than they would have otherwise; they will begin and complete daily work routines an hour earlier, and they will have available to them an extra hour of daylight after their workday activitie^]] However, they will have one less hour of daylight at the start of each day, making the policy less practical during winter.

While the times of sunrise and sunset change at roughly equal rates as the seasons change, proponents of daylight saving time argue that most people prefer a greater increase in daylight hours after the typical "nine to five" workday^] Supporters have also argued that DST decreases energy consumption by reducing the need for lighting and heating, but the actual effect on overall energy use is heavily disputed.

The manipulation of time at higher latitudes (for example Iceland, Nunavut, Scandinavia or Alaska) has little impact on daily life, because the length of day and night changes more extremely throughout the seasons (in comparison to other latitudes), and thus sunrise and sunset times are significantly out of phase with standard working hours regardless of manipulations of the clock.^] DST is also of little use for locations near the equator, because these regions see only a small variation in daylight in the course of the year. The effect also varies according to how far east or west the location is within its time zone, with locations farther east inside the time zone benefiting more from DST than locations farther west in the same time zone.

History 

Ancient civilizations adjusted daily schedules to the sun more flexibly than DST does, often dividing daylight into 12 hours regardless of daytime, so that each daylight hour became progressively longer during spring and shorter during autumn.^] For example, the Romans kept time with water clocks that had different scales for different months of the year; at Rome's latitude, the third hour from sunrise (hora tertia) started at 09:02 solar time and lasted 44 minutes at the winter solstice, but at the summer solstice it started at 06:58 and lasted 75 minutes. From the 14th century onwards, equal-length civil hours supplanted unequal ones, so civil time no longer varies by season. Unequal hours are still used in a few traditional settings, such as some monasteries of Mount Athos^] and all Jewish ceremonies.^[

Benjamin Franklin published the proverb "early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise",^[23][24] and he published a letter in the Journal de Paris during his time as an American envoy to France (1776–1785) suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlig.^] This 1784 satire proposed taxing window shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. Despite common misconception, Franklin did not actually propose DST; 18th-century Europe did not even keep precise schedules. However, this changed as rail transport and communication networks required a standardization of time unknown in Franklin's day.

In 1810, the Spanish National Assembly Cortes of Cádiz issued a regulation that moved certain meeting times forward by one hour from May 1 to September 30 in recognition of seasonal changes, but it did not actually change the clocks. It also acknowledged that private businesses were in the practice of changing their opening hours to suit daylight conditions, 

but they did so of their own volition.

Terminology

As explained by Richard Meade in the English Journal of the (American) National Council of Teachers of English, the form daylight savings time (with an "s") was already in 1978 much more common than the older form daylight saving time in American English ("the change has been virtually accomplished"). Nevertheless, even dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster's, American Heritage, and Oxford, which describe actual usage instead of prescribing outdated usage (and therefore also list the newer form), still list the older form first. This is because the older form is still very common in print and preferred by many editors. ("Although daylight saving time is considered correct, daylight savings time (with an "s") is commonly used.")^] The first two words are sometimes hyphenated (daylight-saving(s) time). Merriam-Webster's also lists the forms daylight saving (without "time"), daylight savings (without "time"), and daylight time.^] The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style explains the development and current situation as follows: "Although the singular form daylight saving time is the original one, dating from the early 20th century—and is preferred by some usage critics—the plural form is now extremely common in AmE. [...] The rise of daylight savings time appears to have resulted from the avoidance of a miscue: when saving is used, readers might puzzle momentarily over whether saving is a gerund (the saving of daylight) or a participle (the time for saving). [..] Using savings as the adjective—in savings account or savings bond—makes perfect sense. More than that, it ought to be accepted as the better form."

In Britain, Willett's 1907 proposal used the term daylight saving, but by 1911 the term summer time replaced daylight saving time in draft legislation. The same or similar expressions are used in many other languages: Sommerzeit in German, zomertijd in Dutch, kesäaika in Finnish, horario de verano or hora de verano in Spanish, and heure d'été in French.

The name of local time typically changes when DST is observed. American English replaces standard with daylight: for example, Pacific Standard Time (PST) becomes Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). In the United Kingdom, the standard term for UK time when advanced by one hour is British Summer Time (BST), and British English typically inserts summer into other time zone names, e.g. Central European Time (CET) becomes Central European Summer Time (CEST).

The North American English mnemonic "spring forward, fall back" (also "spring ahead ...", "spring up ...", and "... fall behind") helps people remember in which direction to shift the clocks.

Daylight savings time bill

Daylight savings time 2019

Daylight savings time 

Time change 

When does time change 

Daylight savings time fall 2019

What time is it 

Fall back 

Fall back time

Fall back daylights savings time

Daylight savings time