By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
NOV. 4, 2025 | As we fell back with our clocks this week and returned to Standard Time, we again wondered: is Daylight Saving Time something we should keep? Is it valuable? Will our country be better off in forgetting this shift in keeping time twice a year. And is it merely confusing us? Would we be better off with the standard “God’s time?”
The reason we still observe this “saving” time: Congress thought Daylight Saving Time (DST) would conserve energy during World War I. The first country to install this saving time was Germany in 1916 with this one-hour difference, mainly to save energy.
However, earlier than that, DST was first observed in Canada. In 1908, the residents of Port Arthur, Ontario, today’s Thunder Bay, came up with the idea to turn their clocks forward by one hour and thereby were the first area to do so to see daylight “earlier” in the day.
Other locations in Canada followed suit: Regina in Saskatchewan in 1914, then the cities of Winnipeg and Brandon in Manitoba in 1916. Note that both are major agricultural areas. According to the April 3, 1916, edition of the Manitoba Free Press, Daylight Saving Time in Regina “proved so popular that by law it now brings it into effect automatically.”
Proponents of the new way of keeping time said we could make better use of natural daylight by moving clocks forward an hour, which reduced the need for artificial lighting and therefore conserved fuel. After being repealed after World War I in the United States, the practice was reintroduced during World War II and later standardized nationwide by the Uniform Time Act of 1966.
Almost from the first, opposing monkeying with time were farmers everywhere in Germany and in the USA. It ran against human (and animal) nature, like pigs, and cows, who wanted to be milked twice daily at the same time.
Another group always vocal about Daylight Saving Time are parents, who find children in school often having to mount school buses in the dark. That’s a strong lobby, so far, to little avail.
As an experiment, between January 1974 and April 1975, the entire United States went on Daylight Saving Time year-round to “combat the energy crisis.” Nobody liked it, so we went back to observing Daylight Savings Time again. Since then, there has been no tinkering with the time.
It is our Congress which establishes how we observe time. Years ago, mainly at the insistence of the railroads, Congress instituted time zones, which are reasonable designations. After all, there’s a vast amount of time between when the sun peeks over the horizon on the East and West Coast. We’ve measured it, and it’s three hours!
So, OK time zones. And OK a standard time in each area of the country.
But OK switching back and forth twice a year for what is obviously a small return? Is it worth it?
In all reasonableness, it seems today that Daylight Saving Time is rather useless. If you are a proponent of not changing the clocks twice a year, let your Congressman know. If enough of us shout out, perhaps we can get rid of this useless institution.
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