This year, that date falls on Nov. 5, with clocks rolling back one hour at 2 a.m. that morning. While the sunset time will inevitably be earlier, the city is already receiving less than 12 hours of daily sunlight.
Under the conditions of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, daylight saving time starts on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November.Clocks used to spring ahead on the first Sunday in April and remained that way until the final Sunday in October, but a change was put in place in part to allow children to trick-or-treat in more daylight.
Some people like to credit Benjamin Franklin as the inventor of daylight saving time when he wrote in a 1784 essay about saving candles and saying,"Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." But that was meant more as satire than a serious consideration. The United States didn't adopt daylight saving time until March 19, 1918. It was unpopular and abolished after World War I.