By Mark Stone

It seems to come earlier and earlier each year but it is that time again . . . time to set your clocks ahead one hour in the annual observance of Daylight Saving Time. Although the traditional time to set the clocks forward is at 2 am on Sunday morning, you better do it before going to bed on Saturday night so you don't forget. Especially those of you who have a game Sunday morning. If you don't you may miss the first couple of innings.

Every spring we move our clocks one hour ahead and "lose" an hour during the night and each fall we move our clocks back one hour and "gain" an extra hour. But Daylight Saving Time (and not Daylight Savings Time with an "s") wasn't just created to confuse our schedules. The phrase "Spring forward, Fall back" helps people remember how Daylight Saving Time affects their clocks. At 2 a.m. on the second Sunday in March, we set our clocks forward one hour ahead of Standard Time ("spring forward"). We "fall back" at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday in November by setting our clock back one hour and thus returning to Standard Time.

Contrary to the trivia heard in the movie “National Treasure”, I know not a highly acclaimed movie but hey it’s been on cable for awhile so . . ., Benjamin Franklin was not the first to actually propose the concept. During his time as an American envoy to France, Franklin, author of the proverb, "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise", anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. Franklin did not propose DST; like ancient Rome, 18th-century Europe did not keep precise schedules. However, this soon changed as rail and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in Franklin's day.

	George Vernon Hudson

According to Wikapedia, Daylight saving time, also known as “summer time” in British English was first proposed in 1895 by George Vernon Hudson, a New Zealand entomologist. Daylight Saving Time was instituted in the United States during World War I in order to save energy for war production by taking advantage of the later hours of daylight between April and October. During World War II the federal government again required the states to observe the time change. Between the wars and after World War II, states and communities chose whether or not to observe Daylight Saving Time. In 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, which standardized the length of Daylight Saving Time from April through October. Daylight Saving Time is four weeks longer since 2007 due to the passage of the Energy Policy Act in 2005. The Act extended Daylight Saving Time by four weeks from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November, with the hope that it would save 10,000 barrels of oil each day through reduced use of power by businesses during daylight hours.

As interesting as the history of Daylight Saving Time is, what is even more interesting is the history of Standard Time. Did you know that the uniformity of our current Standard Time time zones in the United States doesn’t really predate Daylight Saving Time? Imagine that . . . How can we have a Daylight Saving Time when we didn’t even have a Standard Time?

Well, the web site WebExhibits.Org, states that Britain was the first country to set the time throughout a region to one standard time and this was done more as a convenience to the railroad system than anything else. The original idea of standardizing time into a local “time zone” is credited to a Dr. William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828) and more popularized by Abraham Follett Osler (1808-1903). The first railroad system to adopt a “London Time, was the Great Western Railway in November 1840. Other railways later followed, and by 1847 most (though not all) railways used London time (later to be known as GMT). By 1855, the vast majority of public clocks in Britain were set to GMT (though some, like the great clock on Tom Tower at Christ Church, Oxford, were fitted with two minute hands, one for local time and one for GMT). The last major holdout was the legal system, which stubbornly stuck to local time for many years, leading to oddities like polls opening at 08:13 and closing at 16:13. The legal system finally switched to GMT when the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act took effect August 2, 1880.

The adoption of standardized time zones in the U.S. and Canada likewise instigated by the railroads, took place on November 18, 1883. Prior to that, time of day was a local matter, and most cities and towns used some form of local solar time, maintained by a well-known clock (on a church steeple, for example, or in a jeweler's window). The new standard time system was not immediately embraced by all, however.

The first man in the United States to sense the growing need for time standardization was an amateur astronomer, William Lambert, who as early as 1809 presented to Congress a recommendation for the establishment of time meridians. This was not adopted, however, nor was the initial suggestion of Charles Dowd of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in 1870. Dowd, however, revised his proposal in 1872, and it was then adopted virtually unchanged by U.S. and Canadian railways eleven years later.

Naturally, some oddities existed through the US. For example, Detroit kept local time until 1900, when the City Council decreed that clocks should be put back 28 minutes to Central Standard Time. Half the city obeyed, while half refused. Just imagine the confusion this caused. After considerable debate, the decision was rescinded and the city reverted to sun time. Showing a bit of humor in the turmoil, a derisive offer to erect a sundial in front of the city hall was submitted to the City leaders and this was promptly referred to the Committee on Sewers. Five years later, however, Detroit finally adopted Central Standard Time as its uniform standard.

It remained for a Canadian civil and railway engineer, Sir Sandford Fleming, to instigate the initial effort that led to the adoption of the present time meridians in both Canada and the U.S. Time zones were first used by the railroads in 1883 to standardize their schedules. As it happens, Fleming also played a key role in the development of a worldwide system of keeping time. Trains had made the old system - where major cities and regions set clocks according to local astronomical conditions - obsolete. Fleming advocated the adoption of a standard or mean time and hourly variations from that according to established time zones. He was instrumental in convening the 1884 International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, at which the system of international standard time - still in use today - was adopted.

Although the large railway systems in U.S. and Canada adopted standard time at noon on November 18, 1883, it was many years before such time was actually used by the people themselves.

The use of standard time gradually increased because of its obvious practical advantages for communication and travel. Standard time in time zones was established by U.S. law with the Standard Time Act of 1918, enacted on March 19. Congress adopted standard time zones based on those set up by the railroads, and gave the responsibility to make any changes in the time zones to the Interstate Commerce Commission, the only federal transportation regulatory agency at the time. When Congress created the Department of Transportation in 1966, it transferred the responsibility for the time laws to the new department.

Time zone boundaries have changed greatly since their original introduction and changes still occasionally occur. Generally, time zone boundaries have tended to shift westward. Places on the eastern edge of a time zone can effectively move sunset an hour later (by the clock) by shifting to the time zone immediately to their east. If they do so, the boundary of that zone is locally shifted to the west; the accumulation of such changes results in the long-term westward trend.

So once again you have “the rest of the story.” And yes, much more information than you really wanted to know.