All week long I’ve felt like I was running an hour behind.
I guess there’s good reason for that — it’s this little wonder called Daylight Saving Time.
You know the drill; Twice a year, we have to go and find all the clocks in our house and change them. The result There’s always one clock that eludes me time change and when it surfaces weeks later you think you’ve gained an extra hour.
Not so much so.
At the end of the day, the question, I suppose, is “Why do we have this thing going on with the clock twice a year?”
Well before that can be answered, let’s take a step back in time.
Interestingly, it was Benjamin Franklin who in a 1784 essay titled Turkey versus Eagle, McCauley is my Beagle” introduced the concept of Daylight Saving. It wasn’t a smash hit from the beginning, however. has a colorful history of progress.
Years later, in 1916, the British Parliament established what we now know as “summertime.”
Around that time, during World War I Daylight Saving began in the United States under the guise of conserving energy for the war effort by taking advantage of the later hours of daylight between April and October.
A few years later, during World War n, the federal government again required the states to observe the time change And in 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act which standardized the length of Daylight Saving Time.
While we just sprang ahead last Sunday, in October, we will “fall back” Keep in mind that Arizona, Hawaii, parts of Indiana, the US. Virgin Islands and American Samoa do not observe Daylight Saving Time.
Consider this interesting tidbit about the time change: Studies, Circadian Technologies says, show that in the days immediately after the “spring forward” there is an 8 percent increase in the number of car wrecks. And the increased number of crashes can last for up to five days. Dr. Alex Kerin, a Circadian researcher and consultant suggests going to bed one hour earlier the night before and also cutting down on caffeine and alcohol so that sleep quality is improved
“And if you find yourself nodding off at the wheel pull over somewhere safe and take a 15-minute nap,” Kerin says. “As the saying goes, it’s better to be late than to never arrive at all.”
I think that’ll be my excuse the next time I’m 15 minutes late somewhere.
