If you take an overnight Amtrak train on the last Sunday in October (and I don’t necessarily recommend it, at any time), you may awake at 2 a.m. to find the train utterly still, wasting an entire hour in order to stay on schedule. An annoyance, to be sure, but one not nearly on par with that felt by the college students in Athens, Ohio, who in spring 1997 took to the streets, hurling bottles and eggs at the police because they were forced to quit drinking at 2 a.m. due to the advance of the clock.

Even this is a more orderly state of affairs than prevailed earlier in the century. In Idaho, stores were once allowed to observe daylight-saving time at their individual discretion. And in Minnesota in 1965, St. Paul elected to start daylight-saving time two weeks earlier than its twin city Minneapolis, causing a beleaguered school board official to declare, “We are in the middle of a muddle.”

It’s these sorts of absurdities that lead David Prerau and Michael Downing to call the seemingly innocuous innovation “curious,” “contentious,” and “madness” in the titles of their two engaging new books, which trace the history of how progressive thinkers and government bureaucrats came together to add an hour of sunlight to summer afternoons.

Daylight-saving time emerged from the gardens of Edwardian England (where sunlight is still a precious commodity). An architect, astronomer, and horse-riding enthusiast named William Willett conceived the idea on a morning ride in 1905, obsessed over it, and produced an influential pamphlet called “The Waste of Daylight.” Willett won over a number of important individuals (among them Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). The concept became the subject of a national, then an international, debate.

Mr. Prerau highlights the somewhat comic arguments against daylight-saving time, which in some cases veer into Monty Python territory: “Suppose,” scoffed Sir Herbert Stephen, “that the legislature thought it desirable that most men wear white hats, and accordingly enacted that every hat possessing the qualities which we now signify by the word black should … be called white. The result would be that we should mostly wear the same sort of hats as present, and that for official purposes the considerable majority of our hats would be statutorily white.”

This type of argument (another version involved pushing the thermometer up by 10 degrees in winter) prevailed until World War I, when the issue became deadly serious: An extra hour of afternoon sunlight saved energy and increased the efficiency of factories. Germany, not England, was the first to implement it (which later gave opponents yet another reason against it: to avoid “Kaiser Time”). The United States, when it entered the war in 1918, also adopted the practice.

After Armistice, however, only Great Britain made the measure permanent. In America, Congress overrode a presidential veto to end the practice. But that extra hour had so many adherents that municipalities across the country determined to save the daylight, ensuring decades of chaos, interrupted only by one more unified front during WW II. Congress only enacted the Uniform Time Act, which established daylight-saving time as the national norm, in 1966. (It also allowed states to opt out. Arizona, Hawaii, and most of Indiana still do.)

The decades-long debate framed that classic American conflict, between agrarian interests and the rapidly growing industrial and urban centers, pitting a strange alliance of baseball interests, oil companies, and retail magnates against an even stranger one of farmers, religious fundamentalists, and Hollywood moguls. (One of the enduring myths about daylight-saving time is that it was instituted for the sake of farmers: They hated it more than anyone. Hollywood, meanwhile, resented it for two reasons: It kept people who might otherwise have filled theater seats out of doors for an extra hour, and it forced drive-in theaters to start their movies later.)

Mr. Prerau, an MIT scientist who has reported on daylight-saving time for the U.S. government, provides in “Seize the Daylight” (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 272 pages, $23) a tidy and entertaining chronological account of the subject, from inception to its current state of widespread acceptance. In “Spring Forward” (Shoemaker & Hoard, 202 pages, $23), Mr. Downing, a novelist, reporter, and Tufts University creative writing teacher, engages the subject from a bewildered layperson’s perspective. Both books are enjoyable, but Mr. Prerau’s is ultimately more valuable.

The author’s expertise, coupled with a brisk and economic style, results in a more authoritative account, and he navigates a complex subject with an ease Mr. Downing lacks. Mr. Prerau – strangely, given that Mr. Downing is a novelist – also has a better eye for entertaining anecdotes. The latter’s work, which concentrates on the continued confusions of daylight-saving time, occasionally breaks down into a litany of bewildering bureaucratic affairs.

Mr. Downing, however, does observe the critical role played by New York City in the daylight debate. New York continued to observe daylight-saving time after World War I, which caused businesses surrounding it and across the country to do likewise. There was some opposition from theater owners, but a more powerful lobby, Wall Street, favored the move because it allowed extra time to trade with exchanges in London and Liverpool. Exchanges in Philadelphia and Boston followed, and before long, there was a powerful incentive for the rest of urban America to keep up.

This could be considered a case of the financial good and the greater good being fortuitously aligned. For as William Willett noted in his pamphlet, “While daylight surrounds us, cheerfulness reigns, anxieties press less heavily, and courage is bred for the struggle of life.”

Mr. Vaughan last wrote in these pages on the Erie Canal.