As daylight saving time ends Sunday, it’s time to fall back

Like it or not, it’s time to fall back again. Most of the United States and Canada is about to switch to standard time, moving clocks back an hour Sunday morning.

The official time change will come at 2 a.m., when clocks will “fall back” to 1 a.m. That means you’ll get an extra hour of sleep, but overnight workers will have an hour tacked onto their shifts. Sunrise will come an hour earlier; so, too, will sunsets. The earliest sunsets of the year will happen during the next six weeks.

Automated and electronic devices should, in most cases, change the time automatically. But you’ll still have to manually adjust the time displays on older appliances, as well as on microwaves, stovetops and in some vehicles. (As for me, I still haven’t fixed my stove, which has been blinking an incorrect time since a power outage back in July, so that ship has sailed).

When did daylight saving time start?

The idea of daylight saving time has been around since 1784, when Benjamin Franklin proposed it as a joke. He had written a satirical letter to the editor of the Journal of Paris calculating the amount that Parisians could save on candles if they shifted their schedules during the wintertime.

Germany implemented daylight saving time in 1916, and the United States did so in 1918. It was initially unpopular with farmers, since they had less time to harvest and prepare goods in the morning before markets opened.

It wasn’t until 1966 that daylight saving time laws went into effect nationwide. During the 1940s and ’50s, states, counties and even cities made their own decisions. That proved especially confusing for the transportation industry. The Uniform Time Act of 1966, which was put into practice the next year, established dates during which daylight saving time would take effect each year. States were allowed to opt out, as long as times were consistent statewide. Interestingly, the Transportation Department was tasked with enforcing legislation.

Nowadays, most of the United States is on the same page when it comes to “falling back” on the first Sunday in November. There are, however, notable exceptions: Arizona, Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. (Arizona is an interesting case: The Navajo Nation, which represents a quarter of the land in Arizona, does fall back. The rest of Arizona abolished daylight time in 1968, and is permanently on standard time.)

Will we ever stop changing our clocks?

If you don’t like “falling back,” that’s all right; most people don’t. In fact, there have been several attempts in Congress to end the practice. Most have fallen flat.

There are also some in the Northeast who feel that places such as Providence, Rhode Island; Hartford, Connecticut; and Boston should be on a different time zone than the rest of their Eastern time counterparts. There have been proposals to move New England to Atlantic time, meaning that Boston and Nova Scotia, for instance, would be in the same time zone. One proposal in 2016 gained traction, with hopes of eliminating sunsets before 4:30 p.m. (Boston’s earliest sunsets happen at 4:11 p.m. during the first week in December, even though sunrises creep before 7 a.m.)

But consider this: In the country’s northernmost town, Utqiagvik, Alaska, the sun won’t rise for 62 days. And no amount of clock-shifting will fix that.