Something Boomers know, that mystifies today’s newscasters

Tim Pham and Thomas Patrick of KREM 2/Spokane haven’t a clue about the history behind daylight savings time. I guess you have to be a Boomer and have to have been paying attention in elementary school when the teacher explained it. All they could talk about at KREM was the fact that “it will be so cool that it will be bright at 7pm.”

Ray Ramsey would have given a rundown on the history in a few short sentences and made it interesting to viewers.

Every newscaster and weather person should check their sources on topics such as this, since it will obviously come up in conversation on-air.

Just google it, Tim. Or ask Grok (X.com) for an easy explanation:

History of Daylight Saving Time in the U.S.
Before the late 19th century, time was a local affair. Towns set their clocks based on the sun—high noon was when the sun was directly overhead. This worked fine until railroads connected distant places. With trains speeding across regions, local time differences caused chaos: scheduling was a nightmare, and collisions were a risk. Imagine a train leaving a town on “local time” arriving somewhere else where clocks were 20 minutes off. Disaster waiting to happen.
In 1883, the U.S. railroad companies stepped in and pushed for standardized time zones. They divided the country into four zones—Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific—each an hour apart. On November 18, 1883, known as the “Day of Two Noons,” clocks were reset to sync with this system. It wasn’t government-mandated at first; the railroads just did it, and everyone followed. Congress didn’t formalize it until the Standard Time Act of 1918.
Now, daylight saving time (DST) is a different beast. It came later and wasn’t about railroads. The idea of shifting clocks to extend daylight hours popped up in the early 20th century, credited to people like George Hudson (a New Zealand entomologist) and William Willett (a British builder). Germany first implemented DST in 1916 during World War I to save coal. The U.S. followed in 1918 with that same Standard Time Act, which also introduced DST—again, for energy savings, not railroads.
So, why the mix-up? Railroads standardized time zones, which laid the groundwork for a unified clock system. Without that, DST wouldn’t have been feasible on a large scale. But DST itself? That was about wartime efficiency, not train schedules. The railroad connection is more about setting the stage than pulling the lever.