ALERT: Daylight Saving Time ends this weekend

Credit: DaytonDailyNews

Daylight Saving Time (DST) will come to an end this weekend. At 2 a.m. Sunday morning, clocks will be turned back one hour. There are several debates as to why DST exists, but mostly commonly thought to be used to save on energy, specifically during the summer. Due to a later sunset the average consumer would use less energy because the later sunset would mean less time using lights to see.

Sunrise on Saturday November 4th will be at 6:31am, then sunset will move up to 5:30pm on Sunday November 5th.

How it started

We can blame New Zealand entomologist George Hudson for daylight saving time. He wanted extra hours after work to go bug hunting, according to National Geographic, so he came up with the idea of just moving the hands on the clock.  According to the BBC, William Willett arrived at the same idea a few years later and proposed moving the clock forward in the spring and back in the fall in his work, “British Summer Time.”

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Willett’s idea was picked up a few years later by the Germans who used it during World War I as a way to save on coal use. Other countries would soon follow suit. In the U.S., DST was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in 1918.

Will we keep it?

It’s likely that most U.S. states will continue to use DST, though some state legislatures have discussed ending the practice.

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