From uucp Wed Apr 8 17:00 EST 1987 From hadron!jsdy Wed Apr 8 07:37:44 1987 remote from nbires Received: from hadron.UUCP by seismo.CSS.GOV (5.54/1.14) with UUCP id AA00984; Wed, 8 Apr 87 10:21:59 EDT Received: by hadron.UUCP (4.12/4.7) id AA02725; Wed, 8 Apr 87 10:17:34 est Date: Wed, 8 Apr 87 10:17:34 est From: hadron!jsdy (Joseph S. D. Yao) Message-Id: <8704081517.AA02725@hadron.UUCP> To: nbires!vianet!devine Subject: Re: Reason for DST change in US Cc: elsie!tz

Joe Yao writes:

(*sigh*) That may have been a contribution (nopunintended) to DST being finally implemented. I know the Farmers' lobby was agin' it. However, Ben Franklin thought up the idea during one of his ... ummm ... voyages ("junkets" is not used in this area ;-)) to Paris. That was a few years before Clorox and Charcoal Briquettes.

I do notice, however, that your article did not claim that it was solely done at the behest of Halstead, nor solely for his benefit. I seem to vaguely recall some other considerations. And that was definitely not the consideration for its adoption during the War(s), which was probably what inspired Halstead et al. later on.

You misunderstand. I said that the Halstead proposal was just for moving the start of US's DST from the last Sunday in April to the first. I did not write that Halstead was responsible for the invention of the DST idea. His lobbying of Congress occurred about 4 years ago. Here's a thumbnail sketch of how DST came to be: Benjamin Franklin's suggestion for DST was during his tenure as the US ambassador to France (not some junket). His suggestion was ignored. Probably because of the confusion that would have been added to the non-standard timezones then used. However, the true inspiration for DST might have come from a more modern source. An Englishman, William Willet, published a pamphlet in 1907 that called for a seasonal variation in much the same way that Franklin had proposed over a hundred years before him. The first real use of DST came about because of the demands of war. Germany used it during WW I to save electricity. The UK soon followed and many countries did likewise. Most called it "summer time" or "war time". After WW I was over, DST was not observed uniformly across the US because Congress stopped the national observance but many localities kept it anyway. Bob Devine