Did you know, daylight savings time was NOT proposed by Benjamin Franklin, but instead by New Zealander George Hudson? He proposed the idea in 1895, however it was not accepted by an entire country until April 30, 1916 by Austria-Hungary. Currently it is observed by 70 countries around the world with Japan, China, and India being the only industrialized countries that do not observe daylight savings time.
The idea behind daylight savings time is that, by advancing the clocks forward during the spring, you gain an hour of evening daylight to the sacrifice of an early morning daylight hour. It was also originally created to help reduce the use of incandescent lighting. However because of the innovations made in the field of energy and lighting this is no longer necessary. In fact, daylight savings time has been found to be contradictory to those principles now. Because of the way we use energy, its been found that daylight savings time is in fact not saving any energy.
Another problem the daylight savings time presents is the disruptions and mistakes to meetings, travel, broadcasts, billing systems, and records management. If you have a flight that is scheduled to leave at 1:43 PM, is it leaving at 1:43 PM or what you know to be 2:43 PM? And that’s just the beginning of the confusion.
Countries such as Argentina, Chile, Iceland, Singapore, Uzbekistan, and Belarus have moved to a permanent daylight savings time. In 2011, Russia made the switch as well, however it proved unpopular when sunrise began happening too late in the day during the winter. They switched back in 2014.
