Metro Voice News Celebrating Faith, Family & Community
In a sure sign that spring is on the way, it’s time to set clocks forward this weekend. Daylight saving time officially begins at 2 a.m. on Sunday, March 9, though most people will adjust their clocks before going to bed on Saturday night.
The practice of springing clocks ahead an hour started in 1918 as a World War I era measure but was repudiated in 1919 after farmers, a group commonly cited as a reason for the practice, rejected it. As reported by Metro Voice News, research continues to show there are few benefits, including virtually no energy savings, in following daylight saving time.
“The sun, not the clock, dictated farmers’ schedules, so daylight saving was very disruptive,” according to History.com. “Farmers had to wait an extra hour for dew to evaporate to harvest hay, hired hands worked less since they still left at the same time for dinner and cows weren’t ready to be milked an hour earlier to meet shipping schedules.”
Daylight saving time was reimplemented when time zones in the nation were standardized with the Uniform Time Act in 1966. Participating states lose an hour in March (as opposed to gaining an hour in the fall) to make for more daylight in summer evenings. In the Northern Hemisphere, the vernal or spring equinox is on March 20, marking the start of the spring season.
Because of its desert climate, Arizona time (with the exception of the Navajo Nation) doesn’t follow daylight saving. After most of the nation adopted the Uniform Time Act, the state figured that there wasn’t a good reason to adjust clocks to make sunset occur an hour later during the hottest months of the year.
President Donald Trump recently backed a new Senate push to end the “dreaded time changes forever.” The change would require an act of Congress, which has not seen a major push on the issue. Bills to switch to daylight saving time as the national year-round standard in both houses of Congress have languished in committee after being introduced in January.
