Lifestyle: DST: background and motivation
Self-tutoring about a time-honoured tradition: the tutor reflects on the original idea behind daylight savings time.
The following is by my understanding.
When I was a kid, the change from daylight savings time to standard time in the fall (fall back) happened just before Halloween. It made Halloween spooky and fun, since it suddenly got dark an hour earlier. Otherwise, trick-or-treating would have had to start during daylight.
Last year, as I recall, the clocks didn’t get switched back until early November. Therefore, a lot more trick-or-treating was done in daylight. Figures – a trend nowadays seems to be to take the fun out of things.
The motivation to “fall back” was to return to “real time” (I mention how one can tell in my post from Nov 7, 2025). The idea was that, with daylight savings time (DST), the clocks had been moved ahead. That clock change typically happened, in the old days, just after the spring equinox (March 21).
Therefore, in the days of daylight savings time, one was on DST during spring, summer, and early fall; late fall and winter were on standard time, or “true time.”
The motivation for DST, as I understand, was to reallocate a daylight hour from when people would be sleeping to when they would be awake. Theoretically, on Sept 21, the sun would rise 6am and set 6pm. From then until June 21, the days would continue to lengthen in either direction: soon, the sun would rise at 5am and set at 7pm. The reasoning went that 5am to 6am was a wasted hour of daylight for most people. Setting the clocks ahead, the sun would rise at 6am but set at 8pm. Therefore, most people would see more daylit hours.
The result was that, since the clocks didn’t get switched back until late October, the sun would rise at 7am and set at 7pm on September 21. As the days continued to shorten, the sun would rise later and later: soon, it wouldn’t rise until 7:30am, and would set at 6:30pm.
In a northern place like the Maritimes, if the clocks weren’t set back, the sun might not rise until after 8am at the winter solstice. People thought this was too late; they didn’t want the morning commute to be in darkness. Therefore, the clocks would “fall back” just before Halloween, returning to standard time. If yesterday the sun rose at 7:30am, today it would rise at 6:30am. People thought that made sense: commuters who left at 7am would do so in the light.
As I recall, farmers just as often didn’t care about the clock anyway, since their animals didn’t. Their kids had to navigate the time change, but they generally did so on their own, so far as I knew.
Apparently, in BC, there will be no changing the clocks this fall; we are now, permanently, on DST. It seems not everyone thinks it’s a good idea.
I hope to continue about the ideas of standard time and daylight savings time in future posts:)
Source:
Jack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane, Campbell River, BC.