Germany introduces summer time

On Sunday 30 April 1916, at 11 p.m., clocks throughout Germany were moved on to midnight. So began the first summer time in history introduced across a whole state. The same night the people of Austria-Hungary put their clocks forward. From then on the working day began an hour earlier by the sun, and it stayed light longer in the evening.

The change was based on an ordinance of the Federal Council (Bundesrat) of 6 April 1916 “on putting the hours forward during the period from 1 May to 30 September 1916”. The Council issued it under the law of 4 August 1914 that empowered it to take economic measures for the duration of the war. The ordinance laid down that during the summer the legal time would be the mean solar time of the 30th meridian east of Greenwich, and thus an hour later than Central European Time. The summer period began at 11 p.m. on 30 April and ended in the night of 30 September to 1 October, an hour after midnight, when the clocks were to be put back. As early as 8 April the American embassy in Berlin sent a translation of the ordinance to Washington.

The aim was economy. The Central Powers, cut off by the blockade, were short of coal and oil, and longer light evenings were meant to reduce the use of artificial lighting. How much was actually saved could not be reliably measured. The idea itself was much older. As early as 1784 Benjamin Franklin wrote in a Paris newspaper that better use of the day would save candles. From 1907 the English builder William Willett promoted, in his pamphlet The Waste of Daylight, putting the clocks forward in April by 80 minutes in four Sunday steps of 20 minutes. Until his death in March 1915 he lobbied the British Parliament for it without success. Local summer time had been introduced in 1908 by the Canadian towns of Port Arthur and Fort William in Ontario, today Thunder Bay, but Germany was the first to do it as a whole state, in the middle of the war.

The first summer under the new time drew mixed verdicts. The Austro-Hungarian envoy in Munich reported on 29 September 1916 that the Bavarian agricultural council had been against it, because farmers needed light in the morning for milking and feeding the cattle, and the change got in the way of the harvest. Town dwellers mostly welcomed it. Schoolchildren and workers complained of shorter sleep, but workers gained light evenings for rest and work on their allotments. Doctors were on the whole in favour, though they noted that young people coped with the change less well, and advised moving school hours.

Others soon followed Germany. Britain introduced summer time on 21 May 1916, and in the same year most of its allies and many neutral states did so. Russia joined in 1917 and the United States in 1918. The people of Warsaw had already got used to a change of time: one of the first orders of the German authorities after taking Warsaw in August 1915 was to put the city on Central European Time, which turned the hands back by 24 minutes. In Germany summer time returned every year until the end of the war. In 1919 the Weimar Republic abolished it as a wartime measure.