Daylight Saving History, 2018 Dates, What Time It Starts, More You Should Know

Come Sunday, people all across the United States, with the exception of those in Hawaii and Arizona, will finally get back the hour they lost in the spring. All thanks to daylight saving time coming to an end.

Whether you’re awake or asleep on Sunday Nov. 5 the clocks will hit 1:59 a.m. and then a minute later it will be 1 a.m. again. That morning the sun will rise an hour earlier so be sure to draw the blinds before heading to bed Saturday night unless you want the sun waking you bright and early. In New York City and along the East Coast of the United States the sun will rise at 6:31 a.m. EST. But this also means that the sun will be setting earlier and earlier in the afternoon in the coming weeks.

History of daylight saving:

You can thank Benjamin Franklin for the extra hour of sleep when you’re feeling especially rested, or groggy, on Sunday. He’s credited with originally coming up with the concept of daylight saving to extend the days during the warmer summer months. The idea was that shifting the clock would mean the best hours of sunlight happened at the most opportune time of the day.

Daylight saving actually wasn’t signed into law until 1966 when President Lyndon Johnson made it an official practice. Back then the clocks moved ahead by an hour on the last Sunday of April and ended on the last Sunday of October. Since then the timing has changed a bit, President George W. Bush changed the law to fit with a new energy policy in 2005 and moved the start of daylight saving to the second Sunday in March and the end of it to the first Sunday of November. Each one occurs at 2 a.m. Since it became a law, any state has been allowed to opt out, as long as it passed a state law to do so, something only Arizona and Hawaii currently have in place.

If you use a cell phone as your alarm clock, it will most likely change the time automatically. Anything device you own that you manually set the time on though will need to be changed once daylight saving ends. If you want to be sure you’re following the correct time, you can check the U.S. Department of Commerce's National institute of Standards and Technology’s site here. This is also where you can find more information about timekeeping and daylight saving in the U.S.

After this weekend you won’t need to adjust your clocks again until the second Sunday in March of 2018, which will be 2 a.m. on March 11.