Feature
November
3
Clocks Rewind to Standard Time
by Terry Trahan Jr.
Clocks across the U.S. will rewind an hour at 2 a.m. Sunday as Americans leave daylight saving time behind and return to standard time.
Fans of sleep have embraced “falling back” an hour since 1918, when Congress instituted daylight saving time as a way to conserve energy during World War I. Nearly 50 years later, energy conservation remained the primary motive behind enacting the Uniform Time Act of 1966.
Scientists and legislators brainstormed ideas that would help to efficiently reduce electricity use in homes. They studied the number of daylight hours in a typical day and noticed that moving time up an hour would increase the amount of experienced daylight.
In theory, the extended daylight would keep most people outside longer; as a result, less electricity would be used indoors. The U.S. Department of Transportation, which oversees daylight saving time regulations, conducted studies in the 1970s that revealed that daylight saving time helps to reduce the entire country’s electricity use by 1 percent each day, but that claim has been challenged.
Since 1950, electricity usage in the U.S. has risen 13 percent, according to the U.S Energy Information Administration. The EIA also revealed that appliances and lighting account for 56 percent of electricity used in U.S. homes.
The U.S. Department of Energy conducted a 2008 study that measured how much energy is saved as a result of daylight saving time. Researchers found that conservation numbers were low when considering the annual usage of electricity across the nation each year. Each day, daylight saving time saved between 0.46-0.48 percent of electricity usage; these savings occurred over a time frame of three to five hours each evening.
Though this method of energy conservation hasn’t proven to be substantial, people continue to reset their clocks in mid-March and early November to adjust for the time changes. Regulations have evolved over the past century, but the seed for daylight saving time was first planted in the minds of some of history’s greatest thinkers.
In 1784, Benjamin Franklin noted that people were wasting sunlight by not adjusting their daily routines. He proposed that people wake up and go to bed an hour earlier to take advantage of the sunlight hours.
Over a century later, Englishman William Willett wrote “The Waste of Daylight” after he observed that people placed shades in their windows during the sunlight hours. His solution involved advancing the clock four times at 20 minutes each during the spring and summer. This proposal eventually led to the acceptance of British Summer Time, which moved time forward by one hour during summer.
The English experiment made its way to the U.S. during World War I as a way to conserve energy. Though American disapproval led to the removal of the time adjustment, daylight saving time remained for seven months.
Congress reinstated daylight saving time year-round during World War II. Following the war, each parish and county had the option to retain the time or revert to standard time. This option led to confusion for travel and transportation schedules; as a result, in 1966, Congress established the Uniform Time Act to regulate daylight saving time. The designated time would begin on the last Sunday in April and last until the last Sunday in October. In 1986, legislators voted to begin daylight saving time on the first Sunday in April.
Twenty years later, President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which added another extension to daylight saving time. As of 2007, when the act took effect, daylight saving time begins at 2 a.m. on the second Sunday in March and lasts until 2 a.m. on the first Sunday in November.
States and U.S. territories retain the right not to observe daylight saving time, and some have acted on that option. The residents of Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and most of Arizona do not adjust their clocks. Indiana was divided on the issue until the state passed a law in 2005 instituting the observance of daylight saving time.
As most of the country returns to standard time Sunday, and reclaims an hour of sleep in the process, opinion on the issue remains divided. But the clocks will continue to “fall back” and “spring forward” until Congress says differently.
