Episode
Daylight Saving Time: Why Do We Still Change the Clocks?
- Podcast
- Smile with Daniel
- Published
- Jul 16, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 378
- Processing state
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- https://rss.com/podcasts/smile-with-daniel/2995424
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Summary
Mom lost an hour of sleep. She wants to know why we still do this. So does Daniel. Most people think daylight saving time goes back to Benjamin Franklin. It sort of does -- except Franklin never proposed changing the clocks. What he actually suggested was taxing people who had shutters on their windows, limiting how much candle wax a family could own, and firing cannons in the streets at sunrise to scare Parisians out of bed. He was trolling. The clocks idea came from someone else entirely. Two people, actually. A postal worker in New Zealand named George Hudson who collected insects as a hobby and was frustrated that his evening shift ended too late for bug hunting. And a British builder named William Willett, who published a pamphlet in 1907 called The Waste of Daylight -- because he was an avid golfer and the sunset kept cutting his evening rounds short. Willett campaigned for it for years. He died in 1915, one year before it happened. And when it did happen, it had nothing to do with golf. Germany introduced daylight saving in 1916 to save coal for the war effort. Other countries copied them. And once it was in, it stuck. That is the origin story. A bug collector, a golfer, and a world war. But the more interesting question is why we are still doing it. Because today, the evidence for energy savings is a lot less clear than people expected. Some studies find modest savings. Others find almost none. Most of the world has already stopped -- large parts of Asia, Africa, and South America dropped it long ago, and the European Union voted to end it in 2019. And yet about seventy countries still observe it. Why? Because think about everything that depends on clocks staying the same. Airlines. Train schedules. International stock markets. TV broadcasts. Banking systems. S…