Daylight Savings Time

Daylight Savings Time November 5, 2017

Yes or No? Are you for it or against it?

Doyle Rice:

Sick of dark mornings on your way to school or work? It’s your time to rise and shine.

Just like pumpkin spice, falling leaves and football, another rite of autumn is upon us: The end of daylight saving time, which will occur at 2 a.m. Sunday Nov. 5.

At that moment (or the night before), the few analog clocks still around need to “fall back” an hour, turning 1:59:59 a.m. into 1 a.m. Since most of our computers, phones and DVRs do it automatically, it’s not as much of a chore as it used to be.

Starting Sunday, that one hour of daylight is switched from evening to morning as standard time begins.

Credit — or blame — for the biannual shift goes back to Benjamin Franklin, who published An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light in a 1784 journal after he noticed that people burned candles at night but slept past dawn.

But he never saw his plan put into action. The U.S. first implemented daylight saving during World War I as a way to conserve fuel with the Standard Time Act of 1918, also known as the Calder Act.

In World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented a year-round daylight saving time that was commonly known as “War Time.”

In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Uniform Time Act into law.


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