In early November, everyone will be anticipating the results of the presidential election. Although it’s certainly a high stakes campaign, that’s no reason to forget all about daylight saving time, which occurs two nights before the final day of the election. On November 4th, you’ll need to set back all clocks one hour to compensate for Daylight Saving.
Most of the United States currently observes daylight saving time – the practice of adjusting clocks to accommodate for seasonal changes of daylight. Arizona, except for a small area outside the Hopi Reservation, as well as Hawaii, Alaska, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico do not change clocks for daylight saving.
From the late 1970s, daylight saving has been the standard for most of the U.S., and ever since, changing our collective clock back and forward one hour twice a year has become a habit. With the advent of smartphones however, many people simply forget about daylight saving; smartphone clocks are automatically adjusted via satellite. The smartphone adjustment, however, isn’t always reliable, which can be disrupting for the vast number of people who use their smartphones as alarms in the morning.
In the “spring forward” daylight saving of March 2012, many iPhone users reported a bug which caused their phones to display the wrong time. Rather than jumping ahead an hour, the clocks on their phones went back by an hour. For November 4, you may want to disable the automatic time zone settings, so that you can manually adjust for daylight savings.
Saving Energy with Natural Light
In 2005, President Bush signed a bill that revised Standard Time to extend daylight saving time by four weeks. The change was made in an effort to save energy and give farmers more time to work outside in the sunlight. The standard clock springs forward one hour on the second Sunday in March and falls back one hour on the first Sunday in November.
Benjamin Franklin was presumably the first to suggest adjusting the standard clock to reflect changes in sunlight, according to the National Geographic. While in Paris, Franklin observed that the sun rose much earlier than he did, and that he would burn less midnight oil if he woke with the sun. Fast-forward two hundred years to World War I when daylight saving was first implemented on a grand scale. In an effort to conserve wartime resources, the German army instituted daylight savings, and the Allies and Axis powers alike followed suit. In World War II, daylight savings became mandatory in the U.S. in an effort to save resources. However, the policy wasn’t observed after the war until the 1973-1974 Arab oil embargo.
Whether you love the extra hour of sleep or loathe losing precious sunlight, daylight saving is just around the corner.
Don’t Forget to Set Your Clocks Back on November 4th
Posted on: Beverly Hills Real Estate-Beverly Hills Homes For Sale
No comments:
Post a Comment