How Daylight Savings works

Day Light Savings was an idea that came about to give people more time during the summer to enjoy the day. It used to be that there were two times day and night, you woke with the sun rise and slept in darkness. As man mecame more civilized and had better ways to obtain food he/she developed a concept called time. At first it was morning, day, evening, and night. Over the years man developed methods of measuring time(a predetermined length of the day) from candles, to sun dials, the Hour Glass, etc. Aster many centuries man established some given units of time and we ended up with hours, minutes and seconds. It was decided that there were 60 seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day. As our time is based on the sun. If we decided that it was 12:00pm (noon) when the sun was at its highest and cast the shorest shadow then we could figure backwards and fordwards to determine the hour and minute somethihng took place. The problem is that the sun and the earth are constantly moving. With the advent of the Railroad and travel east to west and back some standard time was needed. For example if you leave New YOrk City at exactly noon and travel west at 30 miles per hour on the train after 60 miles you would expect the time to be 2:00pm. But the local time would be 1:56pm. The railroads developed Railroad time which they set the time for each station and thus the surrounding area. Finally the US government with other countries established time zones which were based on the lines of longitude (imminargy lines running north and south around the earth) starting in Grenewich England. Every 15 degrees of longitude the time changes ohe hour. If it is noon in Greenwich, England it is 11:00 AM at 15 degrees West Longitude and it is 1:00PM at 345 degrees East Longitude. Everything to the west of the time zone (Eastern Standard Time ETS, Centeral Standard Time CST, Mountain Standard Time MST and Pacific Standard Time PST) line is same time as the time zone line. To serve the convience of the time zone line might run through a state and town so that one part of the state or ti=own would be one time and the other would be a different time. The time zone lines were drawn to conform to state boundry lines in the United States and each country could change the lines some.

Daylight savings time came about as more people moved to the city and were governed byu the clock and not the sun as a farmer is. Ben Franklin first proposed the idea in 1784 but is was rejected and was reconsidered in 1916 as European countries adopted the idea. Rather than getting up after the sun rose and going to bed while it was still light out the goverment decided to have everyone move their clock ahead one hour in the spring to make the day appear longer. Now you would be getting up in the dark and go to work but when you came home you would have one more hour of day light to enjoy. To acheive this "extra" hour of day light we move the clock ahead one hour (Spring Ahead) in the spring and move it back in the fall (Fall Back). Not all states and countries follow this parctice and some do it on different dates so make sure you check when traveling as to what the correct time is at your location.