While the measure passed overwhelmingly, the City Council felt turnout had been too low to justify enacting the ordinance.
In 1920, the city of Minneapolis even held a one-off referendum on adopting citywide daylight saving time. With London financial markets observing daylight saving time informally, the New York Stock Exchange followed daylight saving time, which meant the Chicago Board of Trade did, which meant the Minneapolis Grain Exchange did. At wars end the federal government retained control of standard time, but left daylight saving time as a local matter.īetween the world wars Minneapolis, not Saint Paul, was more enthusiastic about daylight saving time. When the United States entered the war it too introduced daylight saving for the summer of 1918. Uniformly changing the clock to summer time could solve in one stroke what would otherwise be a co-ordination problem of everyone agreeing to get up earlier or re-schedule activities to allow more evening leisure time in the daylight.Īfter being proposed for several decades daylight saving time received a major boost in World War I when it was adopted as an energy saving measure by both Britain and Germany. Yet because many people have a strong preference to socialize and amuse themselves in the evening, the early morning light was wasted. Without daylight saving time, the hours of daylight got longer in both the early morning and the late evening. Misunderstood at its birth, as it still is, daylight saving time was an efficient solution to a problem urban workers living about 35° and 55° north (or south) of the equator faced in the summer. It was not until World War I that the federal government passed any legislation establishing America’s time.ĭaylight saving time was also an urban invention. Notably, no government promulgated the new time zones. Thus in November 1883 the railroads adopted the four basic time zones we have today. In theory it was easy to adjust, but in practice it was a lot of work, and particularly unsafe on busy railroads. Without great need to co-ordinate across places, towns and cities set their own time, and by the 1870s America had hundreds of different standard times that varied by mere minutes as one moved east or west. But towns and cities needed clock time for coordinating peoples’ daily encounters, and railroads needed clock time to ensure safe operation. Clock time was unnecessary on farms and in small villages where people could rely on encountering each other frequently. Until the nineteenth century most people lived by sun time, with their hours of labor and leisure governed by when the sun rose and set. Like the Southwest light rail decision, the path to Minneapolis and Saint Paul ending up on different times was a long one. Today the story is both a cute curiosity of local history, but also offers some parables about the downsides of having too many levels of government involved in decisions.
At the time the Twin Cities’ discordant time change was the best example yet of absurd inconsistencies across America in recognizing daylight saving time. In May 1965 Saint Paul actually did do daylight saving time differently than Minneapolis.
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