As the period for Daylight Saving Time has been getting longer and longer in recent years, I was curious about how long it was when it was originally implemented.
The first documented duration I could find was in New Zealand, in 1928: about four months out of the year. (Germany and Austria-Hungary implemented it first, but I couldn’t find out what the duration was.)
In the US, we’re now up to eight months of DST each year. This means that what we’re supposed to think of as the temporarily changed time of the year is in fact the norm, and the exceptional period of the year is really the four months of Daylight Losing Time. Pretty soon DST will lap DLT, and we’ll all be setting our clocks two hours ahead, or behind, or something. This. Must. Stop.