Time to Change Clocks!! 2:00a.m Sat.

It’s time to fall back. Clocks in every time zone should be reset from 2:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. in Sunday’s wee hours, affording an extra hour of sleep for all but the most hardy night owls, who instead get an extra hour of insomnia.

In case you’re tossing and turning about daylight saving time (DST), here’s why we adjust our clocks twice a year.

Note that there’s no “s” on the end of daylight saving — after all, it’s not a coupon. However, the practice of resetting clocks was in a very real way based on saving money.

Ben Franklin is widely credited for being the first to have the bright idea. As an American delegate in Paris, Franklin in 1784 reasoned that the late-rising French could save a great deal of money in candles if daylight could last just one hour longer for the half the year. His concept revolved around the simple logic that people should sleep while it’s dark and work while it’s light. We have no say over the tilt of Earth’s axis, which lengthens and shortens the hours of daylight through the seasons, but we can easily adjust the human inventions of time and clocks.

The U.S. had an on-again, off-again relationship with DST, first adopting it in 1918 as part of the Standard Time Act establishing time zones. The likes of shopkeepers and tourism boards favored it for extending daily hours of business, while farmers, postmen and others felt it was disruptive, and probably wondered why everyone else couldn’t haul themselves out of bed a little earlier. The government insisted on some consensus during World War I and World War II, when DST helped conserve electricity.

Modern DST practice is based on the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which wrote DST into law but allowed a loophole for any jurisdictions that didn’t want to sign on. Hawaii and Arizona are the only U.S. states that don’t currently observe DST. Hawaii’s nearness to the equator makes for a negligible difference in daylight hours from one season to the next, and anyone who’s been to AZ on a blistering July day knows why the state declined to extend worktime hours under the scorching sun. Adding to the logistical headache of being out of synch with other Mountain Time keepers, though, is the fact that the Navajo Nation occupying a huge portion of northeastern Arizona does indeed observe daylight saving. Suffice to say, if you’re scheduling any plans in AZ from across state lines, call ahead.