Get ready to “fall back”

Daylight Savings Time ends this weekend. Standard time returns at 2 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 5.

The idea of adjusting working hours to daylight hours was proposed in 1784 in Benjamin Franklin in the “The Journal of Paris.” Franklin calculated the savings in the candles burned.

World War I brought more attention to the energy-saving idea of DST. The United States adopted DST for seven months in 1918. DST became popular again in WW II. After the war, local jurisdictions were free to choose whether or not to use DST. The time change was standardized by federal law in the U.S. in 1966. During the energy crisis, in 1974, permanent DST was enacted in the United States. It was repealed a year later. The most common complaint was DST was unsafe for children who were left waiting for school buses in the dark.

Under current law, states can opt out of DST and stay on standard time year round, or adopt DST.

Voters in some states would prefer to stay on DST year round. In 2018, the Florida Legislature approved the Sunshine Protection Act, which would have kept DST year round in the Sunshine State. However, such a change would require approval from the federal government and Congress has not yet amended the existing federal law.