Today there is a big push to go permanently to Daylight Savings Time (DST). Colorado has already passed a law that will have Colorado go permanently to DST when Congress allows it to happen. The U.S. Senate in 2022 passed a bill to make DST permanent, but the House did not take it up.. There are harmful medical effects when there is a time change, however the medical professionals seem to prefer going permanently to Standard Time instead of DST, because it best aligns with human circadian biology.
People today do not seem to realize making DST permanent has been tried before. In 1973, Congress passed a bill making DST permanent for two years in order to save energy costs. So from January 7, 1974 until October 27, 1974 DST was in effect. It ended early and it lasted less than a year, because people did not like the dark mornings. Some children took flashlights with them when they left for school. (I remember this event because of an editorial cartoon which had Nixon cutting off one end of a blanket and then sewing it back on the other end.)
The advantage of DST is that you have an extra hour of sunlight in the evening. In the summer, under Standard Time, that extra hour of sunlight would have been in the morning when most people would have been asleep, so DST shifts that hour to be when most people would be awake in the evening.
If I had to choose one or the other, I would choose Standard Time over DST, however I do like the longer evenings in the summer. My preference would be to have both but shorten DST to start on the Spring Equinox and end on the Autumn Equinox. I do not understand why DST in America extends now into November.
I find it interesting that DST was not set nationally until 1966. The first time nationally America had DST was in 1918 to save energy during World War I. Again in World War II, DST or “war time” was used as part of the war effort, but it was not until 1966 when Congress standardized DST. DST was extended in 1975 and again in 2005.
Also I find it interesting how we assume things like time zones have been around forever. Not so! It was in 1918, the bill that set DST for World War I also nationally set time zones in the continental U.S. Before that it was up to the states and the railroads. The railroads led the way with time zones because they needed a consistent time standard as their trains traveled across the country. Railroad time was a thing that people used, and effectively created the time zones before they became official. Back in 1884, there was an international conference that set the Prime Meridian (0 degree longitude). That conference made the Prime Meridian go through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. This made it possible to standardize time zones around the world, but it was not until 1963 when Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) became a standard. That officially gave the time zones the needed reference time. UTC is the time in Greenwich, England. Every 15 degrees longitude makes an hour difference. It took until 1963 before all the pieces were in place. To be fair, solar time, placing 12 noon when the sun was the highest, is pretty obvious, but time zones allowed people to travel without having to adjust their time pieces every few miles.
PS In 2005, I visited the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. The museum there was great and I learned a lot about the development of small accurate clocks and the use of time to determine longitude.
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