We’re just a handful of days away from that semi-annual task of changing your clocks to comply with daylight saving time.
And, yes, it’s “saving,” not “savings” time, which is how it’s often stated.
At 2 a.m., Sunday, November 6, your clocks need to be set back an hour. They’ll stay that way until 2 a.m. Sunday, March 12, when they’re turned back to 1 a.m.
Polls and studies have revealed that most Americans would prefer to remain on daylight time. Members of the Georgia General Assembly heard their constituents last year and passed legislation to keep the state on daylight time.
Georgia is one of 18 states that want to keep DST while more than two dozen more have introduced legislation in their statehouses toward that end. Neither Georgia’s measure, those by the other states, or any bills pending in other legislatures would take affect, however, unless the United States Congress gives approval for the entire country to permanently go to DST.
Congress allows states to opt out of changing to daylight time, but so far, not keeping it. Arizona and Hawaii don’t change their clocks, primarily because of location.
With temperatures routinely above 110 in the summer months, Arizona doesn’t need more light to create heat. Hawaii, because of its spot on the globe, experiences very little variance in it’s periods of light and dark during the year.
People in part of Arizona do change their clocks. The Navajo Nation — which extends from Arizona into New Mexico and Utah — observes DST so that everyone who lives on the reservation is on the same schedule. Some Amish communities don’t change their clocks.
Shortly after the time changed in March this year, the United States Senate unanimously approved a bill that would make Daylight Saving Time permanent beginning in November 2023, a significant leap forward in the push to ensure an extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day all year round.
Known as the Sunshine Protection Act, the bill earned 17 cosponsors from both parties in the upper chamber and was passed by unanimous consent. Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, has long been a proponent of making the clock change permanent and led the push to pass the bill.
“The good news is if we can get this passed, we don't have to keep doing this stupidity anymore,” Rubio said on the Senate floor. “Hopefully this is the year that this gets done and, pardon the pun, but this is an idea whose time has come.”
Rubio pointed to research showing that an extra hour of sunlight later in the day leads to reduced crime levels, a decrease in seasonal depression and more time for children to play outside.
Rubio said his bill delays the change until 2023 to accommodate airlines and other industries who set their schedules far in advance.
An identical version of the bill has been introduced in the House and referred to a subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce last month.
Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, a Democrat from New Jersey, backs ending the clock-switching but has not decided whether to support daylight or standard time as the permanent choice.
The bill would allow Arizona and Hawaii to remain on standard time as well as American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The federal government last extended the DST period by four weeks in 2007.
DST has been in place in nearly all of the United States since the 1960s after being first tried in 1918. Year-round daylight savings time was used during World War Two and adopted again in 1973 in a bid to reduce energy use because of an oil embargo and repealed a year later.
It is now used in more than 70 countries worldwide and affects more than one billion people in those places. It became an annual observance in the United States in 1966 on an act of Congress after sporadic use for military purposes in WWI and WWII.
According to history.com, Englishman William Willett led the first campaign to implement a time with more daylight. The story of Willett goes that while on an early-morning horseback ride around the desolate outskirts of London in 1905, Willett had an epiphany that the United Kingdom should move its clocks forward by 80 minutes between April and October so that more people could enjoy the plentiful sunlight.
The Englishman published the 1907 brochure “The Waste of Daylight” and spent much of his personal fortune evangelizing with missionary zeal for the adoption of “summer time.” Year after year, however, the British Parliament stymied the measure, and Willett died in 1915 at age 58 without ever seeing his idea come to fruition.
Daylight saving time was introduced during World War I by Germany and Austria in April, 1916, becoming th first countries to do so. Within a few weeks, the United Kingdom, France, and many other countries followed the idea. Most of them reverted to standard time after the war, and it wasn’t until the next World War that DST made its return in most of Europe.
While the Germany and Austria were the first countries to switch time, A form of DST appeared first in Canada when a few hundred residents of Port Arthur, Ontario — today's Thunder Bay — turned their clocks forward by one hour on July 1, 1908.
Other locations in Canada soon followed suit. On April 23, 1914, Regina, Saskatchewan, implemented DST. The cities of Winnipeg and Brandon in Manitoba did so on April 24, 1916.
At the end of the war, the U.S. officially returned to standard time as a nation, but towns, cities and states across America ignored the directive and operated on their own clock. Things stayed that way until DST returned in WWII.
Three weeks after the end of the war, standard time returned, and with it again one time here is an hour later/sooner than there. Sometimes this happened in just a matter of miles.
At one point in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., DST began two weeks earlier in St. Paul than Minneapolis. There were 23 different end/start dates in the state of Iowa alone.
Consider this: Passengers on a 35-mile bus ride from Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, W.Va., passed through seven time changes.
Scenarios like that led to the enactment in 1966 of the Uniform Time Act, which standardized daylight saving time from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October, although states had the option of remaining on standard time year-round.
Over the years, the DST beginning date slowly moved into March and ending date into November, where it’s seemed to settle.
At least for now.
