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Daylight Saving Time will begin at 2 a.m. Sunday, March 12 as Tennesseans will set their clocks forward by one hour. DST will continue until Nov. 5, barring passage of a federal law in the interim, at which time clocks will be returned to standard time.

Daylight saving time is the practice of advancing clocks one hour during warmer months so that darkness falls at a later clock time. The typical implementation of DST is to spring forward in Spring and fall backward in Fall to return to standard time. As a result, there is one 23-hour day in early spring and one 25-hour day in the middle of autumn.

The idea of DST is nothing new as the plan of aligning waking hours to daylight hours to conserve candles was first proposed in 1784 by Benjamin Franklin. In a satirical letter to the editor of The Journal of Paris, Franklin suggested that waking up earlier in the summer would economize on candle usage; and calculated considerable savings.

DST was first used in the US with the Standard Time Act of 1918 which was a wartime measure for seven months during World War I installed in the interest of adding more daylight hours to conserve energy resources. Year-round DST, or “War Time”, was installed again during World War II. After the war, local jurisdictions were free to choose if and when to observe DST until the Uniform Time Act which standardized DST in 1966.

Permanent daylight saving time was tried during the winter of 1974, but there were complaints of children going to school in the dark and working people commuting and starting their work day in the dark during the winter months so the idea was dropped the next year.

Since that time, experts have come forward on both sides, decrying the good and bad of DST. Congress has even gotten involved in recent years, taking steps to make DST permanent. However, despite rumors and clamoring, the plan is still to fall back this Fall.

The exceptions to DST in the United States are the states of Hawaii and Arizona although the Navajo Nation within Arizona does observe the change, keeping in synch with federal law.