yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Daylight Saving Time 101 | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Daylight saving time adds extra hours of daylight during the summer season while making the day shorter during the winter months. But who came up with the concept of daylight saving time, and how does it work?

The concept of shifting our clocks to adjust the length of the day can be traced back to over 100 years ago. In 1895, New Zealand entomologist George Hudson made the earliest known proposal for a time shift, submitted to the Wellington Philosophical Society. The idea was well-received, but it didn't catch on.

In 1905, British builder William Willett developed a similar idea independently of Hudson. He lobbied the British Parliament year after year to no avail until his death in 1915. The issue was revisited time and again throughout the world, but it wasn't officially put into practice nationwide until the early 20th century.

In Germany, the Germans, in the throes of World War One, were looking for ways to conserve energy. They decided that more daylight was the answer and became the first country to enact daylight saving time. Today about 70 countries around the world practise daylight saving time.

Clocks in the northern hemisphere are usually set ahead by one hour toward the end of March or early April. In late September or early October, they're set back one hour. In the southern hemisphere, the reverse occurs.

While many countries originally adopted daylight saving time to extend daylight hours and cut down on the need for artificial light, critics today say it no longer saves energy. In fact, an estimated 80 percent of the global population does not use daylight saving time.

Some countries are divided about its use. In Australia, three out of eight states and territories do not practice daylight saving time. In the United States, Hawaii and most of Arizona do not bother with daylight saving time, and some states are considering doing away with it.

There are also apparent health and safety issues that come into play. The shift to and from daylight saving time has been linked to an increased risk in heart attacks and automobile fatalities.

There's no shortage of opinion when it comes to daylight saving time, and whether the world will agree on how to manage our clocks is yet to be seen.

[Music]

More Articles

View All
Visually dividing decimal by whole number
In this video, we’re going to try to figure out what 4 tenths divided by 5 is. So pause this video and see if you can think about it before we work through it together. We’re really going to think about approaching this visually. All right, now let’s wor…
Recursive formulas for arithmetic sequences | Mathematics I | High School Math | Khan Academy
G is a function that describes an arithmetic sequence. Here are the first few terms of the sequence: the first term is four, the second term is three and four-fifths, the third term is three and three-fifths, and the fourth term is three and two-fifths. …
Background of the Carthaginians | World History | Khan Academy
Gustin’s previous videos discuss how Rome became a republic in 509 BCE, but it’s worth noting—and I’ve done this in other videos—that at that point, Rome was not this vast empire; it was really just in control of Rome itself. But over the next few hundred…
How to Make a Friction Fire | Live Free or Die: DIY
[Music] I want to talk to you a little bit about friction fire. The tools that you need are: you need your hearth board, you need a spindle, and you also need a nest. With the nest, I like to start out with my longer fibers, and I’ll just twist those arou…
Complex numbers
This video is going to be a quick review of complex numbers. If you studied complex numbers in the past, this will knock off some of the rust, and it’ll help explain why we use complex numbers in electrical engineering. If complex numbers are new to you,…
New Hampshire Summer Learning Series Session 1: The Student Khanmigo Experience
All right, well good morning everyone. Um, welcome to the first of our series of the New Hampshire summer learning series, and my name is Danielle Sullivan. Um, I’m excited I’ve met actually many of you, so hello nice to meet you again. Um, and for those …