Hate Daylight Savings? New York State Could Soon Ditch It!

Before you get excited, let's go over some history first as although many think that Benjamin Franklin instituted Daylight Saving Time, we actually have both World Wars (and the Germans) to thank for losing an hour of sleep every year!

The practice dates back to 1916 when the Germans were looking for a solution to conserve fuel oil during the Great War and bring more hours of daylight productivity. Many other European countries followed suit almost immediately followed by the U.S. two years later but it was just as annoying to residents back then as it is now so each country (including ours) ended up dropping it. It was then reinstituted again during WWII when things got tight and then dropped AGAIN once post-war conditions improved.

Tricky Dick Nixon finally signed it into U.S. law in the 70's as part of his Oil Embargo and different schedules were toyed with until 2005 when George W. Bush's Congress settled on the current one of setting clocks forward at 2am local time on the second Sunday in March then 'Falling Back' in November.

Many world countries don't observe, considering their time zones and even two U.S. states: Arizona and Hawaii and a handful of our territories: Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, and the American Samoa don't either. But why? As you likely guessed, it's mostly because all of those areas have ample sunshine.  There are many disadvantages from people losing sleep that there is actually an effort underway now for Massachusetts to jump on that bandwagon and maybe even the rest of New England as they want to move into the Atlantic Time Zone, effectively rendering DST moot. Fingers crossed!

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