Daylight Saving Time: Early Start, Late Finish


A few things you maybe didn’t know about daylight saving time:

• It was first established in 1918, but was such a source of strife and arguing that it was repealed in 1919.

• From that point on, some states sprang ahead and fell back. Others did not. Even after the passage of the Uniform Time Act of 1966, some states such as Hawaii and Arizona chose not to participate.

• Because the creation of standardized national times was done in part to make railway travel easier and more efficient, daylight saving time is under the jurisdiction of the federal Department of Transportation.

• In Indiana, where part of the state is in the Eastern Time Zone and part is in the Central Time Zone, 77 of the state’s 92 counties did not observe daylight saving time. Until 2005. Then, as soon as the state finally agreed to go with the national system, the federal government changed the system.

• As part of the energy bill passed by Congress called the Energy Policy Act of 2005, daylight saving time is now one month longer. The purpose of the change: to save energy.

The Department of Transportation did a study of the impact of daylight saving time in March and April of 1974 and 1975. Nationwide, that translated to an energy savings of 10,000 barrels of oil each day. And that was before the personal computers were a fixture in American households.

Starting this year, daylight-saving time has been changed from its traditional calendar dates to a start three weeks earlier — Sunday, March 11 — and a finish one week later, Sunday, Nov. 4.

Daylight saving time gains an extra hour of daylight during the early evening, resulting in the conservation of energy by substituting natural sunlight for electrical lighting.

This year, because the clocks are being changed at a different time of year, beware of problems with automatic clocks, such as those in computers.

Apple and IBM have information on their Web sites that explain changes that may occur.

 


—Cynthia Hochswende

 

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