New Again, this is wrong! The time change was introduced by Germany in the 1880s, and systematized and generally applied by the USA at the same time. There was no question of saving energy. As the American designation (DST = Daylight Saving Time) suggests, on the contrary, in the wake of the technical progress of the time and the improvement in the related living and working conditions, the objective was to be able to take greater advantage of the daylight by the time zone difference of one hour to the east (GMT + 1) between spring and autumn. The concept appealed but suffered the vicissitudes of successive world conflicts. When the European Commission intervened, in 1977, by means of its Directive, it was only to put an end to the anarchy which then reigned in the Europe of the Nine (mainly because of the British who changed their time to other dates and for a duration different from the continent) in the application of the time change. Lacking direct competence, it had to resort to the bias of justification by the need to make energy savings – much needed following the first oil shock due to the Yom Kippur War. In any case, the energy savings will remain minimal and even the Belgian motorways will remain lit at night on car-free Sundays! Energy savings are therefore completely unrelated to the origin of the time change or to the reasons for its introduction.
