Daylight saving time ends on November 4

Clocks officially go back 1 hour at exactly 2 AM tomorrow. So before you go to sleep, tonight, set your clocks back 1 hour so that you are not late for your chores. It comes every year, but for many, it is really confusing.

Daylight saving time is a widely used system of adjusting the official local time forward, usually by one hour from its official standard time, for the summer months. This is intended to provide a better match between the hours of daylight and the active hours of work and school.

Daylight saving time began one month earlier and continued for an extra week this year. Earlier this annual ritual used to be performed before Halloween. This year Daylight Saving Time began on March 11 and will end on November 4.

The switch was mandated by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which moved the date from the final Sunday in October to the first Sunday in November.

Benjamin Franklin is credited with first proposing the idea of Daylight Saving Time in 1784. Thereafter it was seriously proposed by William Willett in the "Waste of Daylight", published in 1907, but he was unable to get the British government to adopt it, despite considerable lobbying.

The idea of DST was first put into practice by the German government during the First World War, between April 30 and October 1, 1916. Shortly afterward, the United Kingdom followed suit, first adopting it between May 21 and October 1, 1916. On June 17, 1917 Newfoundland became the first North American jurisdiction to adopt DST with the passing of the Daylight Saving Act of 1917.

The extension of the Daylight Saving Time is a part of a phased move designed to conserve electricity and save an estimated 300,000 barrels of oil a year. In 2005, the United States decided to lengthen the daylight time period when it passed an energy bill. The idea is that shifting an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening reduces home power consumption by better matching waking time with daylight hours.

The main reasons behind changing daylight saving time are aptly put by Democratic Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, who claims that the change translates into less electricity consumed, less crime, fewer traffic fatalities and more opportunities for outdoor recreation.