Daylight saving time is the practice of putting clocks forward, usually by an hour, in spring and back again in autumn, so that waking hours line up better with the hours of natural light. The name describes the point of the exercise: daylight that would otherwise be slept through in the early morning is ‘saved’ and shifted to the evening. In Britain the official name is summer time, but ‘daylight saving time’ is the phrase most of the English-speaking world uses for the twice-yearly ritual of changing the clocks.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘daylight saving time’?
Benjamin Franklin is often wheeled out as the inventor, on the strength of a satirical letter he sent to the Journal de Paris in 1784 suggesting that Parisians could save a fortune in candles by getting out of bed earlier. It was a joke about Parisian lie-abeds, and he proposed rousing them by other means, not touching the clocks, so crediting him with daylight saving time overstates things considerably.
The first serious proposal to move the clocks themselves came from George Hudson, a New Zealand entomologist who wanted more after-work daylight for insect collecting. In 1895 he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour seasonal shift. The society ridiculed the idea, and it went nowhere for decades.
The phrase itself, though, is British, and grew out of the campaign run by William Willett, a London builder. His 1907 pamphlet The Waste of Daylight argued that “the sun shines upon the land for several hours each day while we are asleep”, and proposed advancing clocks by twenty minutes on each of four Sundays in April, reversing the process in September, to gain “80 minutes more daylight after 6 p.m.” Note that his own title was not ‘daylight saving’. That name arrived when his scheme reached Parliament: the Daylight Saving Bill, introduced to the Commons by the Liberal MP Robert Pearce on 12 February 1908, put the phrase into official circulation, and the failed bills that followed kept it in the newspapers.
By 1911 British draft legislation had switched to the tidier ‘summer time’, which is why, when war made fuel economy urgent, the measure finally passed as the Summer Time Act 1916. Germany had adopted the scheme on 30 April 1916; Britain followed on 21 May, a year after Willett died without seeing his idea enacted.
One point of endless dispute is the s. ‘Daylight saving’ is the older and official form, a compound meaning the saving of daylight, but ‘daylight savings’ is now common in American speech. Either way, as anyone stumbling about in a dark October evening will tell you, no daylight is actually saved: like daylight robbery, the name promises rather more than it delivers.