Daylight Saving Time ends this morning at 2am:
Sunday, November 3, 2013 So, don't forget to set your clocks BACK one hour tonight before bedtime!!! Check your smoke detectors too!!!
and begins again
Sunday, March 9, 2014
It is the practice of advancing clocks during the lighter months so that evenings have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn.
The modern idea of daylight saving was first proposed in 1895 by George Vernon Hudson and it was first implemented by Germany and Austria-Hungary starting on 30 April 1916. Many countries have used it at various times since then. Much of the United States used DST in the 1950s and 1960s, and DST use expanded following the 1970s energy crisis. It has been widely used in North America and Europe since then.
The practice has been both praised and criticized. Adding daylight to evenings benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours, but can cause problems for evening entertainment and other occupations tied to the sun (such as farming) or to darkness (such as firework shows).Although an early goal of DST was to reduce evening use of incandescent lighting (formerly a primary use of electricity), modern heating and cooling usage patterns differ greatly, and research about how DST currently affects energy use is limited or contradictory.
DST clock shifts present other challenges. They complicate timekeeping, and can disrupt meetings, travel, billing, record keeping, medical devices, heavy equipment, and sleep patterns. Software can often adjust computer clocks automatically, but this can be limited and error-prone, particularly when DST dates are changed.
Industrial societies generally follow a clock-based schedule for daily activities that does not change throughout the course of the year. The time of day that individuals begin and end work or school, and the coordination of mass transit, for example, usually remain constant year-round. In contrast, an agrarian society's daily routines for work and personal conduct are more likely governed by the length of daylight hours and solar time, which change seasonally(days being longer in summer and shorter in winter), due to the Earth's axial tilt.
By synchronously resetting all clocks in a society to be one hour ahead of Standard Time (one hour "fast"), individuals who do follow a year-round schedule will effectively wake an hour earlier than they would have otherwise; they will begin and complete daily work routines an hour earlier, and they will experience an extra hour of daylight following their workday activities. An immediate drawback to this trade is that individuals will experience one fewer hour of daylight at the start of each day, making the policy less practical during winter.
While the length of daylight hours in the morning and evening increase roughly equally as the year moves from winter to summer solstice, proponents of Daylight Saving Time have argued that the majority of individuals would appreciate a greater increase in daylight hours after the common "nine-to-five" workday. Supporters have also argued DST decreases energy consumption by reducing the need for lighting and heating, but the actual effect on overall energy use is heavily disputed.
DST has less practical effect in more northern or southern locations on the globe. The manipulation of time at such latitudes has little impact on daily life, because the length of day and night changes more extremely throughout the seasons (in comparison to other latitudes), and thus sunrise and sunset times are already out of sync with standardized working hours. DST is also of little use for locations near the equator, because these regions see only a small variation in daylight throughout the year.
History
Although not punctual in the modern sense, ancient civilizations adjusted daily schedules to the sun more flexibly than modern DST does, often dividing daylight into twelve hours regardless of day length, so that each daylight hour was longer during summer. For example, Roman water clocks had different scales for different months of the year: at Rome's latitude the third hour from sunrise,hora tertia, started by modern standards at 09:02 solar time and lasted 44 minutes at the winter solstice, but at the summer solstice it started at 06:58 and lasted 75 minutes. After ancient times, equal-length civil hours eventually supplanted unequal, so civil time no longer varies by season. Unequal hours are still used in a few traditional settings, such as some Mount Athos monasteries and all Jewish ceremonies.
During his time as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, publisher of the old English proverb, "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise", anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. Franklin did not propose DST; like ancient Rome, 18th-century Europe did not keep precise schedules. However, this soon changed as rail and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in Franklin's day.
Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson, whose shift-work job gave him leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-hours daylight. In 1895 he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch, New Zealand, he followed up in an 1898 paper. Many publications credit DST's proposal to the prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett, who independently conceived DST in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer's day. An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk. His solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later. The proposal was taken up by the Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) Robert Pearce, who introduced the first Daylight Saving Bill to the House of Commons on 12 February 1908. A select committee was set up to examine the issue, but Pearce's bill did not become law, and several other bills failed in the following years. Willett lobbied for the proposal in the UK until his death in 1915.
Starting on 30 April 1916, Germany and its World War I allies (Austria-Hungary) were the first to use DST (German: Sommerzeit) as a way to conserve coal during wartime. Britain, most of its allies, and many European neutrals soon followed suit. Russia and a few other countries waited until the next year and the United States adopted it in 1918.
Broadly speaking, Daylight Saving Time was abandoned in the years after the war (with some notable exceptions including Canada, the UK, France, and Ireland for example). However, it was brought back for periods of time in many different places in the coming decades, widely during the Second World War. It became widely adopted, particularly in North America and Europe starting in the 1970s as a result of the 1970s energy crisis. Since then, the world has seen many enactments, adjustments, and repeals.
