Why do we “Spring Forward”?

It’s that time again…time to “spring forward”!  I grew up in Madison, Indiana in the days when the majority of Indiana didn’t change time!  Remember, this is during the dark days when living in the country meant whatever television channels you could pick up on the antenna, in our house, it was NBC and CBS, (that’s right, I never saw Happy Days or Laverne and Shirley until I went to college!) both out of Louisville and when time changed, prime time programming started at 7:00 p.m.!  And scheduling doctor appointments in Louisville was challenging because you had to schedule on “fast time” when you lived on “slow time”, heck, there is a bridge in Madison so socializing and working between the states is common…wedding invitations even used the terms, imagine, getting a wedding invitation that said 5:30 p.m. (slow time)!

So why do we do this?  Daylight saving time starts on the second Sunday in March and ends on the second Sunday in November throughout most of the United States and Canada. This is supposed to provide more daylight hours in the evening during the summer months.

There are a lot of stories about who proposed the time change and why, first up…In 1895, a postal clerk and entomology hobbyist in New Zealand named George Vernon Hudson was the first to propose a daylight saving time schedule so he could have more time after his shift to catch insects. Then a Londoner named William Willet proposed a daylight saving time schedule in 1905 so that he would have more time to play golf during the summer. While both of the proposals gained attention, neither led to the adoption of a daylight saving time practice.

According to history, the first time daylight saving time was put into practice was in 1916 by Germany and their allies during World War I as a means to save coal for the war effort. The rest of Europe quickly followed with  Russia being the last to implement in 1917, after the abdication of Czar Nicholas II.  The United States adopted daylight savings in 1918 after becoming heavily involved in the war effort.

In the United States, following the war, the practice of daylight saving time was left up to state and local governments (boy was that a mistake!) and quickly led to chaos as neighboring communities often had different daylight saving time start and end dates, while other communities decided not to observe daylight saving time at all. The mass confusion led to the Uniform Time Act of 1966. The act standardized the daylight saving time practice, but allowed for state’s and local governments to petition for exemption.

You know why I like it right?  As a Realtor, showing Buyer’s homes in the daylight allows us to see the curb appeal, the neighborhood of the homes for sale…My Seller’s like it for that reason too!  Seller’s work hard to make their home attractive inside and out, it’s better if Buyer’s can see it!  The market is moving quickly, I’m hearing stories every day from agents in our office that homes are selling within days of going on the market! Call, email or text me if you are ready to make a move!


Vicki Reed

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