On the night of Saturday March 26 to Sunday March 27, 2022, you will lose an hour of sleep. We are moving to summer time and you can enjoy the sunlight for longer in the evening. Advance your watches and clocks one hour, at 2 o’clock it will be 3 o’clock.
On this occasionFrance Bleu Besançon offers you a collector’s France Bleu watch. To try your luck, simply register in the game module below before Sunday March 27 at midnight.
A short history of the time change
The principle of time change is applied in more than 70 countries around the world. It consists of adjusting the official local time in order to take advantage of the additional hours of sunshine from spring to mid-autumn. Its principle is very simple: during the transition to winter time, the time is set back by sixty minutes, and this, exactly at 3 a.m. whereas, unlike, for the transition to summer time, the time is advanced sixty minutes from 2 am. The first then allows us to gain an hour and the second, to lose one, but also to be able to take advantage of the longer hours of sunshine, which often extend into the evening.
It was first in 1784 that Benjamin Franklin, physicist, writer and American diplomat, underlined the idea of shifting the hours to the changes of seasons, for the purpose of saving energy. But no one followed through on the idea until it was revived in 1907 by a British inventor and entrepreneur named William Willet. As part of a campaign on saving energy, it publishes a brochure called “Waste of Daylight” in which the process is explained. Germany was the first country to take part in this new measure and a short time later it was the turn of England in 1916. France, for its part, followed suit the same year, under the initiative of the deputy of the Basses-Alpes, André Honnorat. However, the time change was canceled in 1945, following the German Occupation. The time change was finally reinstated in 1975, for economic purposes.