Big Candy, Bugs and the Daylight Savings Delusion
Sometime around 2 a.m. this Sunday, November 1, the country gets an hour back, and by breakfast half of us will be standing in the kitchen trying to remember how to reset the clock on the microwave. Before you go digging for the manual, you should know who to thank for all this, because it isn’t who you’ve been told.
Despite what you may have picked up in grade school, it wasn’t the farmers. When Congress first put the country on clock-shifting in 1918, the agricultural lobby fought it so hard that the law was repealed the following year.
The idea actually came from a bug collector. In 1895, a New Zealand shift worker and amateur entomologist named George Hudson was fed up with the sun setting before he could get out and hunt for insects, so he did what any determined hobbyist would do and wrote a formal paper proposing that everyone move their clocks two hours. Society would benefit, he argued, and he’d get more daylight for collecting.
Benjamin Franklin didn’t invent it either. His well-known 1784 letter was satire, poking fun at Parisians for sleeping until noon and spending a fortune on candles.
So why do we fall back on November 1 instead of in late October?
Follow the sugar! Part of the answer lies in your kid's trick-or-treat bag.
For decades, the autumn change came on the last Sunday of October. When Congress pushed it into November with the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the official reason was saving energy, but candy makers had spent years lobbying to stretch daylight past Halloween. Their math was hard to argue with: more light on Halloween night meant kids stayed out trick-or-treating longer, and more candy got sold.
So enjoy the extra sleep this Sunday, and if someone at brunch goes on about the farmers, feel free to set the record straight between mimosas.
