Why daylight saving exists and who abolished it

Twice a year, roughly a third of the world moves its clocks, and roughly a third of the world complains about it. The practice has outlived every rationale originally offered for it, which is a reasonable definition of an institution.

It was not invented by farmers

The most persistent myth about daylight saving is that farmers wanted it. They did not, and they lobbied against it consistently. Cows do not read clocks, and shifting the human schedule an hour earlier means milking in the dark and waiting an hour longer for the dew to lift off the hay.

The idea was floated by the New Zealand entomologist George Hudson in 1895, who wanted more daylight after work to collect insects, and separately by the British builder William Willett in 1907, who resented cutting his morning ride short. Neither persuaded anyone.

What persuaded governments was war. Germany adopted it in April 1916 to reduce coal consumption for lighting; Britain followed within weeks; the United States in 1918. The argument was that an hour of evening daylight is an hour of lamps not burning, and in a war economy that is coal not mined.

The rationale kept changing

Most countries dropped it after the First World War and readopted it during the Second. After 1945 the picture fragmented — in the United States, states and even individual cities chose independently, producing a period in the 1960s when a bus route between Ohio and West Virginia crossed seven time changes over 35 miles. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 ended that.

The 1970s oil crisis brought a new energy argument. The 1980s and 1990s brought a retail argument: an extra hour of evening daylight means more shopping, more golf, more barbecue charcoal. The lobbying record on American daylight saving extension is unusually candid about this.

The energy case has not aged well. A study of Indiana’s 2006 switch — where counties adopted daylight saving at different times, creating a natural experiment — found residential electricity increased by about one percent. Air conditioning in the warmer evening now outweighs the lighting saved.

The case against

The evidence that has accumulated is about the transition, not the offset:

• Heart attacks rise by around 24% on the Monday after the spring change, and fall by a similar amount after the autumn one.
• Fatal traffic collisions rise measurably in the days after springing forward.
• Sleep loss and circadian disruption take about a week to settle, and longer in adolescents.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the European Sleep Research Society and their equivalents elsewhere have all called for permanent standard time — not permanent summer time, which is the option politicians usually reach for. Their argument is that morning light, not evening light, sets the human circadian clock, and permanent summer time means dark winter mornings indefinitely.

Who has abandoned it

The list has grown steadily:

• Russia — abolished in 2014, after a 2011 experiment with permanent summer time produced dark winter mornings and considerable unhappiness.
• Turkey — abolished in 2016, permanently on UTC+3.
• Brazil — abolished in 2019, after decades of use. The stated reason was that the energy saving had disappeared as consumption patterns changed.
• Iran — abolished in 2022.
• Mexico — abolished in 2022 for most of the country, retaining it only in municipalities near the United States border.
• Egypt — abolished in 2014, reinstated in 2023. Not every trend is one-directional.

Japan, India, China, Singapore and almost all of Africa and Southeast Asia have never used it at all. Countries near the equator have little reason to: the day length barely varies, so there is nothing to shift.

The European Union’s unfinished business

In 2018 the European Commission ran a consultation that drew 4.6 million responses, 84% of them favouring abolition. The European Parliament voted in 2019 to end seasonal clock changes from 2021.

It has not happened. The directive requires each member state to choose permanent summer or permanent winter time, and the choices threatened to produce a patchwork: a Spain on permanent summer time next to a Portugal on permanent winter time would put a two-hour border across the Iberian peninsula. Rather than fragment the single market’s timekeeping, the file has sat.

Until it moves, the changes continue. Every European Union zone changes at the same instant — 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday of March and October — which is why Lisbon, Berlin and Helsinki all shift simultaneously despite reading different local times when they do.

What this means for scheduling

The practical consequence is that the gap between two cities is not a constant. The United States springs forward two to three weeks before Europe does, so for those weeks New York is four hours behind London rather than five. Australia and New Zealand move in the opposite direction entirely, in April and October.

If you have a recurring meeting across those boundaries, it will drift. The only reliable fix is to anchor it to one side’s local time and accept that the other side’s clock reading changes — or to schedule in UTC and let everyone convert, which is unpopular but correct.

The permanent-summer-time experiment

Both alternatives to the status quo have been tried, and one of them has been tried twice with the same result.

The United States moved to permanent daylight saving time in January 1974, during the oil crisis. Approval was around 79% when it was announced. By February, after a winter of children walking to school in the dark and several widely reported traffic deaths, it had fallen to roughly 42%. The policy was repealed in October, less than a year in.

Russia tried permanent summer time in 2011 and reversed it in 2014 for the same reason: dark winter mornings in a country where they are already long.

This is why sleep researchers advocate permanent standard time rather than permanent summer time, and why the distinction is worth insisting on when the subject comes up. The popular version of “abolish the clock change” usually means keeping the summer evenings, which is the version that has failed twice.