Happy & Healthy
10 things you didn’t know about daylight savings time
Last Monday was the first official day of spring, but if you ask me, summer is going to start kicking in on Saturday. Perhaps not temperature wise, but on Saturday night we’ll be biding farewell to winter and entering summer mode.
And hence we can once again make way for our biannual topic of discussion about whether we should be able to sleep in an hour longer or an hour less. I’ve got a simple mnemonic for you. Winter-time isn’t fun, but we do get to sleep in an hour longer so how’s that for some consolation. And there’s one thing you have to do for that wonderful summer-time: sleep an hour less. And there you have it; another topic to discuss on those long summer nights…
1
It’s been exactly 100 years since DST was introduced.
2
The Germans were the first to implement DST during the First World War so that they could spare some energy and reuse it in warfare.
3
The reason it is called Daylight Saving Time is because it is considered the most efficient way of using what daylight we have. Otherwise it will light in the summer while you’re sleeping and dark when you’re still awake. This allows better use of the hours when it’s light out and you use less electricity.
4
The States stopped using DST after a year and president Roosevelt reintroduced it after the Second World War.
“This allows better use of the hours when it’s light out and you use less electricity.”
5
Using summer- and winter-time saves us hundreds of thousands of liters of oil.
6
There are a lot of adversaries who claim that we don’t actually save up as much as we think and that it’s very damaging for your health.
7
There are more traffic accidents the week after we’ve changed our clocks from winter to summer-time. Yikes.
8
There are people out there who use the hashtag #stopdst on Twitter.
9
This anti group has yet to decide if they want the winter-time or the summer-time as a base.
10
During summer-time, there are fewer cases of breaking in and entering. Well if that isn’t a great excuse to stick to summer-time, then I don’t know what is. That and all those endless nights outdoors drinking wine…
