Daylight savings time ends at 2 a.m. local time on Sunday morning November 7th, in all states except Arizona and Hawaii, giving those working hard in the struggling economy an extra hour of much needed rest. All states except for Arizona and Hawaii chose to adopt the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which codified the country’s “Fall Back, Spring Ahead” practice. Every year on the first Sunday in November clocks are set back one hour, and on the second Sunday in March, clocks are set ahead one hour.
Ben Franklin is often credited with initiating the Fall Back, Spring Ahead clock tweaking, but he only proposed a time change in jest to tease the Parisians who were not inclined to follow his “early to bed, early to rise” philosophy. In fact the idea for daylight savings time was first proposed in 1895 by George Vernon Hudson, an entomologist in New Zealand who valued after-hours daylight because of his hobby of collecting insects. Hudson proposed a two hour daylight shift in a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society. He reasoned the practice would “bring working hours of the day within the period of daylight”.
Hudson’s proposal was received with mixed reactions according to records, and three years later he refined the idea, arguing that adjusting the clocks twice a year would allow the early morning daylight hours to be utilized, and “a long period of daylight leisure would be made available in the evening for cricket, gardening, cycling, or any other outdoor pursuit”.
Nineteen years later, Germany was the first country to formally adopt daylight savings time, in order to reduce energy demand during World War I.
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