Set timepieces back an hour Saturday
Published 2:48 pm Friday, November 3, 2017
Don’t forget to set timepieces back an hour Saturday night or you might arrive at work or church early Sunday.
Daylight saving time ends — officially — at 2 a.m. Sunday, when clocks, watches and many handheld electronic devices are reset to 1 a.m. Many people will change the time on their timepieces before they go to bed tonight.
Sunrise and sunset Sunday will occur about an hour earlier than Saturday.
Most of Arizona and Hawaii do not use daylight saving time. The Palmyra Atoll (in the south-central Pacific Ocean), Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Northern Mariana Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands and U.S. minor outlying islands do not use daylight saving time.
The United States has observed daylight saving time for 100 years, beginning in 1918, in at least one location. Currently, daylight saving time starts the second Sunday of March and ends the first Sunday of November.
Forgetting to change clocks, watches and other timepieces back an hour in the fall or ahead an hour in the spring can result in people being late or early, sometimes causing worry, if not problems.
Washington resident Julia M. “Betty” Gray posted this experience on Facebook: “Last year Rick and I were in France on the night when that country went from Daylight Savings to Standard Time. It was the night before our flight home – which we definitely did not want to miss. The time change was on television and in newspapers in French. I was glad I had some knowledge of the language or things could have been very dicey the next morning. Our biological time clocks stayed confused, especially when the U.S. went back to Standard Time a week later!”
Daylight saving time — known as summer time in the British Isles — is the practice of moving timepieces ahead by an hour during the “lighter” months of the year (second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November) so mornings have less daylight and evenings have more daylight. Some people mistakenly credit Benjamin Franklin for “inventing” daylight saving time. He did not.
George Vernon Hudson first proposed the modern concept of daylight saving time in 1895. Hudson was an English-born astronomer and entomologist who lived his adult years in New Zealand. He was a member of the 1907 Sub-Antarctic Islands Scientific Expedition. Franklin, in a somewhat joking manner, proposed the concept of daylight saving time in 1784. Ancient civilizations engaged in a similar practice to modern DST.