Daylight savings starts early

Daylight Saving Time has been changed from its traditional calendar dates to start three weeks earlier, Sunday, March 11, and finish one week later, Sunday, Nov. 4.

Daylight Saving Time is practiced in order to gain an extra hour of daylight during the early evening, resulting in the conservation of energy by substituting natural sunlight for electrical lighting.

The new start and finish dates will add about two months to the energy-saving period, the purpose of a law pushed through Congress by Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey.

According to The Old Farmer's Almanac, Daylight Saving Time first began in 1918 during World War I to allow for more evening light and save fuel for the war effort. Since then, Daylight Saving Time has been used on and off, with different start and end dates.

Benjamin Franklin first suggested the idea in 1784. It was later revived in 1907, when William Willett proposed a similar system in the pamphlet The Waste of Daylight. The Germans were the first to officially adopt the light-extending system in 1915, followed by the British, and in 1918 the United States, when Congress passed the Standard Time Act, establishing our time zones.

This is the first change to Daylight Saving Time since 1986 when Markey first came on the scene. He brokered a change in which light-saving time would begin in early April rather than late April, which had been the case since 1966.