Daylight Saving Time ends

This Saturday night, November 2, marks the end of Daylight Saving Time with everyone turning their clocks back one hour before going to bed.

Less traumatic than the start of Daylight Saving Time, its end in the fall allows for an extra hour of sleep, even though the sun will be setting earlier.

Although we’ve been under the misconception that Daylight Savings Time was started in order to give farmers an extra hour of daylight during the summer, it actually starting with something of a joking letter written by Benjamin Franklin in Paris, 1784, suggesting the clock change would save energy as it would provide an extra hour of daylight and lessen the need for candlelight.

Daylight Saving Time didn’t actually become a thing until nearly a century later when Germany established it as a way to conserve fuel during WWI. The rest of Europe caught on a little later and the US adopted the practice in 1918.

Once the war was over, President Woodrow Wilson wanted to keep Daylight Savings Time but farmers objected to losing an hour of morning light. It was abolished until WWII brought it back into the spotlight and President Franklin Roosevelt re-established it 1942, calling it “War Time”.

Chaos ensued after the war when states and towns were given the choice of whether or not to observe Daylight Savings Time.

In 1966, congress finally enacted the Uniform Time Act, meaning any state observing Daylight Savings Time had to follow a uniform protocol throughout the state, rather than the willy-nilly use from town to town.

Less than 40-percent of the countries in the world still observe Daylight Savings Time, but the population of the US is rather attached to the extra hours of daylight they get during the summer months.