One Gate

Changing the Clocks: Daylight Saving Time Ends? Begins?

I'm constantly forgetting whether it's Daylight Saving Time or Standard Time; I can never remember if we're supposed to be saving sunlight during winter when darkness prevails, or saving time during summer when there's lots of daylight. To help me remember when to change my clocks this fall, in April I joined a helpful Facebook event entitled "Change Your Clocks." My friend Jenna thought I was ridiculous to remind myself a good six months early to change my clock in November, but if I hadn't gotten the reminder earlier this week, I'd have completely forgotten: tonight Daylight Saving Time ends and we turn the clocks back one hour.

Debate swirls around the concept of Daylight Saving Time (also known as Daylight Savings Time or DST). DST happens roughly from spring through fall; in the Northern Hemisphere it usually starts in March or April and ends in October or November. While I'd always heard that DST existed for farmers, turns out it was mainly adopted to conserve energy, reduce crime rates and cut down on traffic accidents. According to the California Energy Commission, by manipulating the clock so that the sun sets later, there is less time between sunset and bedtime, and therefore less need for electric lights at night. However, if you're against the idea, you're not alone. StandardTime.com proposes not only ending DST but getting rid of the four time zones in the US, instead splitting the country in half and separating them by two hours. Interested? See more about their proposal here.

WebExhibits.org has an interesting history of Daylight Savings time: in 1784 Ben Franklin wrote a satirical letter to the editor of the Journal of Paris, entitled “An Economical Project”; Franklin suggested that Paris fire cannons at sunrise to get people up earlier and therefore save candles at night. However, the idea of DST wasn't formally adopted by any country until 1916, when Germany and Austria took up the idea; much of the rest of Europe quickly followed suit over the next few weeks. The United States joined in the fun in 1918, although the dates and months involved have changed through the years, most due to war time; Daylight Savings Time is still not observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and in most of Arizona.

Other pieces of Daylight Saving Time fun trivia:

 ~ If you're planning on traveling south, be aware that in the Southern Hemisphere DST occurs October - March, since the seasons are reversed and October through March are the "lighter" months.

 ~ In Great Britain, DST is also called "summer time" (a handy way to remember when it occurs!); standard time is called "winter time."

 ~ According to WebExhibits, Daylight Saving Time helped one man avoid the Vietnam War draft: "When drafted, he argued standard time, not DST, was the official time for recording births in his state of Delaware in the year of his birth. Thus, under official standard time he was actually born on the previous day--and that day had a much higher draft lottery number, allowing him to avoid the draft."

 ~ Check the CA Energy Commission website to see when DST will start and end every year until 2015. And check TimeandDate.com to see which countries follow DST and when it starts and ends around the world.

If you live in California or most of the rest of the US, early tomorrow morning Daylight Savings Time will end, catapulting us backwards in time, and in order to keep up you should turn your clocks back when you go to bed tonight. Hopefully someone will start another Facebook group to remind me to change them again next March.