Daylight Saving Time

What is Daylight Saving Time? Here's the Story Behind Changing Our Clocks

Daylight saving time -- or as some people say "daylight savings time" -- is the changing of the clocks that typically begins in spring and ends in fall.

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Daylight saving time is upon us once again, when we'll "spring forward" and lose a little extra sleep in exchange for a little extra daylight.

What is daylight saving time and why do we switch our clocks twice a year? Here's the story.

What is Daylight Saving Time?

Daylight saving time -- or as some people say "daylight savings time" -- is the changing of the clocks that typically begins in spring and ends in fall.

Under the conditions of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, daylight saving time starts on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November.

On those days, clocks either shift forward or backward one hour.

But that wasn't always the case.

What's the History Behind Daylight Saving Time?

Clocks used to spring ahead on the first Sunday in April and remained that way until the final Sunday in October, but a change was put in place in part to allow children to trick-or-treat in more daylight.

In the United States, daylight saving time lasts for a total of 34 weeks, running from early-to-mid March to the beginning of November in states that observe it.

Some people like to credit Benjamin Franklin as the inventor of daylight saving time when he wrote in a 1784 essay about saving candles and saying, "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." But that was meant more as satire than a serious consideration.

Germany was the first to adopt daylight saving time on May 1, 1916, during World War I as a way to conserve fuel. The rest of Europe followed soon after.

The United States didn't adopt daylight saving time until March 19, 1918. It was unpopular and abolished after World War I.

On Feb. 9 ,1942, Franklin Roosevelt instituted a year-round daylight saving time, which he called "war time." This lasted until Sept. 30, 1945.

Daylight saving time didn't become standard in the US until the passage of the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which mandated standard time across the country within established time zones. It stated that clocks would advance one hour at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday in April and turn back one hour at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday in October.

States could still exempt themselves from daylight saving time, as long as the entire state did so. In the 1970s, due to the 1973 oil embargo, Congress enacted a trial period of year-round daylight saving time from January 1974 to April 1975 in order to conserve energy.

Under legislation unanimously passed by the Senate last year, known as the Sunshine Protection Act, the seasonal changing of clocks would effectively be eliminated in the U.S., except for Hawaii and parts of Arizona.

Despite passage in the Senate, the bill has stalled in the House, where it remains in a committee to this day.

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