Daylight Savings Time (DST) starts at 2 a.m. Sunday so remember to set your clocks ahead before going to bed — assuming of course that you are in bed asleep at 2 a.m. after a Saturday night out.
In this computerized and digitized world, our computers set themselves ahead overnight. I have a watch that picks up the time signal from the National Institute of Standards and Technology world time clock signal in Fort Collins, Colorado and resets itself.
DST is supposed to help us save energy by making the day seem longer because the longer daylight hours fall into the evening. The truth of that claim has been debated and DST is not really a modern concept. Benjamin Franklin hatched the idea in 1784 in an essay An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light.
Old Ben’s idea didn’t catch on for about a century when the American railroads went to a standardized time for their schedules and then the government imposed it in World War I to conserve energy.
After the war ended, so did DST but it went into force for WWII and after that war some states used it and others did not and those who did imposed it at different dates of the year.
In 1996, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act which required states that used DST to do it at the same periods nationwide. Today, Hawaii and most of Arizona stick to normal time.
My paternal grandmother has little use for DST.
“It’s stupid,” she would say. “It’s like trying to make a blanket longer by cutting a foot off one end and sewing it on the other end.”
Related articles
- What is Daylight Saving Time? (genzpad.com)
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- Daylight Saving Time was first seriously (mobilebaldwinhomes.wordpress.com)
- MERLINE: The great daylight saving scam – Washington Times (gds44.wordpress.com)
