Daylight Saving 2013: Change Your Clocks on March 10

Those poor clocks just want to tell you the time, and you have to keep pushing them forward and back each year.

Daylight Saving Time 2013 begins at 2 a.m. on Sunday, March 10 and ends at 2 a.m. on Sunday, November 3. Your job is to move that clock ahead one hour and grumble as you lost an hour of sleep. At least you will get more sunlight in the evening.

Your fancy electronic gizmos should automatically adjust for Daylight Saving Time.

Lucky for them, Arizona, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, U.S. Virgin Islands and American Samoa do not observe Daylight Savings Time. 

When did we start shifting our time around? The first official national time shift wasn’t until 1918, but the United States decided to end it, before picking it up again during World War II. The restart was for energy conservation reasons and ended when the war was over, but came up again with the Uniform Time Act in 1966. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 extended daylight saving to eight months instead of six months.

Ben Franklin originally proposed shifting the time to save candles. The jury is out whether or not the time change saves energy in the modern era.

But why does the shift happen at 2 a.m.? Webexhibit has the answer:

In the United States, 2 a.m. was originally chosen as the changeover time because it was practical and minimized disruption. Most people were at home and this was the time when the fewest trains were running. It is late enough to minimally affect bars and restaurants, and it prevents the day from switching to yesterday, which would be confusing. It is early enough that the entire continental U.S. switches by daybreak, and the changeover occurs before most early shift workers and early churchgoers are affected.