The time change is often connected to the oil shock of 1973, yet its true origin is very earlier.
The time change is this Saturday, March 29. During the night for Sunday, at 2 am, the clock will leap at 3am, removing an hour of sleep. If the idea of withdrawing this time change has been debated for years, it is still in place in this form, since 1975. It has been established by decree following the oil shock. The objective was to save energy by coinciding natural lighting and human activities. It was harmonized in 1998 throughout the European Union.
However, its origin is actually very previous. As early as 1784, Benjamin Franklin mentioned the idea of shifting the schedules to save energy in The Journal of Paris,, But this proposal was not taken seriously and remained unanswered for more than a century. It was in Germany that the time change took shape for the first time on April 30, 1916 to save energy and therefore resources like coal. It was followed by the United Kingdom less than a month later.
France did the same with a summer time proposal in 1916 and an adoption in 1917. During the Second World War, the time change was upset by the German occupation which introduced a difference of one hour between the occupied part and the free zone. This discrepancy disturbed rail traffic, so that the Vichy regime ended up aligning itself on German time. At the Liberation in 1944, summer time was definitively abandoned. It only returned to 1975 to reduce artificial lighting times in the evening.
If the decree Who acts the time change was published that year and applied the following year, at the time, the passage at the winter time was made on the last Sunday in September. It was not until 1996 that this date was fell to the last Sunday in October. The transition to summer time was already the last Sunday in March at 2 a.m. This measure, which had to be provisional, persists today and has a story that therefore dates back well before the oil shock.