Daylight Saving Time: You are about to lose one hour

This Sunday we'll all time travel.

What?! Yes.

You've read it correctly.

This Sunday (November 1, 2020) we'll all go back in time 1 hour because of the end of daylight savings time. It's a chance for us to re-do whatever we did wrong but never a chance to leave it as an opportunity to arrive late to your appointments. Did that not make any sense? Probably due to the jetlag we're already feeling due to the upcoming time travel. Anyways, here's a reminder: this Sunday, turn your clocks back 1 hour. Most cell phones automatically update their clock but if yours doesn't or if you still have a lot of analog clocks – don't forget to turn them all back 1 hour.

Do you know why we use daylight savings time? While this custom was first applied in Germany during World War I as a way to preserve energy, centuries before Benjamin Franklin had proposed a form of daylight saving on his “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light” essay. He writes that Parisians could save the money they spent on candles by waking up one hour earlier, making use of the natural morning light. While most view the idea as a joke, provoking the French for being too bohemians, it was the same line of thinking used by the Germans. Something like “hey, if the sun could stay up a little longer we'd have less need for electrical energy, and electrical energy is something we cannot afford to lack during wartime”. But it was such a brilliant idea for a number of reasons, that several nations began to do it. Some adopted daylight savings time throughout their nations, some only in some parts. Hawaii, Arizona, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the US Virgin Island, for instance, do not mess with their clocks. Some countries use it just during summer, others for the majority of the year.

In America, it was only in 1966 when the Uniform Time Act was created, that daylight saving across the US became standardized. Before the Act, each state could decide when and how long they would enforce daylight savings time, which created a huge mess with several different artificial time zones within the country. Ever since 2007, America's daylight saving stretches about 8 months of the year, from March to November. There are some people who don't like it and try to end it by asking their representatives to take their states off daylight saving time. However, this movement has not been successful. In fact, Indiana, one state that never adopted daylight saving time, decided in 2007 to stop being stubborn and joined the majority of the nation. A hard blow for the “resistance”. Lastly, if you do not care at all about time traveling - hey, you can use the extra hour of sleep, right? Enjoy it!