Probing Question: Why do we have Daylight Saving Time?

By Melissa Beattie-Moss - Research/Penn State Crack open Bartlett's Familiar Quotations , and you'll find hundreds of quotes and quips about the concept of time. Some celebrate bygone days, or lament lost youth, and many advise us to enjoy every minute, as in the Robert Herrick poem which opens, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old Time is still a-flying." While time itself is beyond our control, clocks and calendars are man-made constructs — and, as most Americans are reminded each spring and fall, time can be tampered with. But why do we "fall back" and "spring ahead" at all? Explained Jon Nese , a senior lecturer in meteorology at Penn State, "The modern idea of Daylight Saving Time, or DST, was first proposed in the 1890s in two papers published by a New Zealand entomologist, G.V. Hudson, who apparently appreciated the value of after-hours daylight for his insect-collecting habits." A decade later, an Englishman named William Willet independently lobbied for DST in Britain. "His idea came before the House of Commons in 1908, but it was never made law," noted Nese. For seven months during World War I, the United States adopted Daylight Saving Time under the premise of conserving electricity. Said Nese, "Franklin Roosevelt brought DST back in 1942 and called it 'War Time' — it ran year-round for three years. For two decades after the war, states were free to choose if and when to observe DST.