Just like allergies, college basketball and mud, another rite of spring is upon us: The start of Daylight Saving Time, which begins at 2 a.m. Sunday.
At that moment (or the night before), the few analog clocks still around need to “spring forward” an hour, turning 1:59:59 a.m. into 3 a.m. Since most of our computers, phones and DVRs do it automatically, it’s not as much of a chore as it used to be.
Starting Sunday, one hour of daylight is switched from morning to evening. We don’t go back to Standard Time until November.
Credit — or blame — for the biannual shift goes back to Benjamin Franklin, who published “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light” in a 1784 journal after he noticed that people burned candles at night but slept past dawn.
But he never saw his plan put into action. The U.S. first implemented daylight saving during World War I as a way to conserve fuel. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Uniform Time Act into law. continue reading at USA Today
