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CoastRider - Edition 470
569 - March
October
5th20th
20132015
13
History of Daylight Saving Time in Europe
In Spain, we are all going to gain an hour's sleep on
Saturday night, going into Sunday morning, so better
prepare yourself now. Although your digital mobile
phones, tablets and computers may all update
themselves automatically, any analogue clocks or those
not wired to the digital world, while have to be reset by
hand. So, before you go to bed, wind the clock forward
an hour and you'll be all set until the spring. Forget to do
so, and if you have plans, you may find yourself waiting
alone and feeling silly for an hour.
According to www.timeanddate.com, Daylight
Saving Time (DST) was first used in Germany in 1916.
Several European countries started using DST, aka
Daylight Savings Time during World War I, which lasted
from July 1914 until November 1918. This supposedly
was to give farmers an extra hour of daylight early
morning to achieve their tasks. Austria and Germany
stopped using DST in 1919 or 1920, while the United
Kingdom, Ireland and cities in France kept on setting
their clocks back and forth.
During World War II, Hitler’s commanders imposed
German time as they moved through Europe but it did
not always work. Denmark was one of the countries that
adopted DST during the war and planned to end it in
mid-August in 1940. The French resisted DST at the start
of the war but they failed to resist the German army,
which meant that they were officially on “Hitler time” by
1941. There were some French patriots who stuck to the
old French time, two hours behind the Berlin-based DST.
DST was also implemented in the aftermath of World
War II, mainly to help people conserve fuel for national
recovery and rebuilding programs. Berlin, in Germany,
was divided into four occupation zones after the war
and until 1948, the French, British, American and Soviet
occupiers imposed DST on residents in the city.
However, many European countries later abandoned
daylight saving time, as DST became a reminder of the
war itself and the humiliation of foreign occupation.
Both the Italians and the French repealed DST after
clearing up the debris of German occupation. In fact, the
French refused to adopt DST until the worldwide oil
shortage during the 1970s. Daylight saving time was
instituted in France in 1975 following the oil shock of
1974 with the aim to make savings by reducing lighting
needs. This is mainly to better match the operating
hours with daylight hours to limit the use of artificial
lighting.
By the early 1980s, many countries of the European
Union were using daylight saving time, but they had
different practices, thus impeding transport schedules
and communications within the continent. In 1996 the
European Union (EU) standardized an EU-wide daylight
saving time for consistency to apply across the EU. Most
European countries that are EU-affiliated follow the EU
rules or directives. The EU daylight saving schedule runs
from the last Sunday of March through the last Sunday
of October. In 2000, an EU directive was issued on
daylight saving arrangements. In the directive, it was
mentioned
that
summer-time
arrangements
maintained for the past 20 years would be renewed for
an unspecified period. It also noted that the last
Sundays of March and October were to be the dates
definitively adopted for the daylight saving schedule
among EU countries.
Most countries in Europe now follow a synchronized
daylight saving time that lasts from the last Sunday of
March until the last Sunday of October each year. Please
note: any mention of summer and winter in this article
refers to the seasons in the northern hemisphere. Both
the Coastrider and timeanddate.com wish to thank
sources such as M. Downing, author of Spring Forward:
The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, and D.
Howse, author of Greenwich Time and the Longitude,
for some of this information.