New York, October 26: The United States will usher in November by moving clocks back by an hour!
The first Sunday of November, which is when the Daylight Saving Time ends, incidentally falls on the 1st of November this year.
Going by the annual ritual, followed since 1966, the change in time will be therefore affected on this day.
The Daylight Saving Time officially began at 2:00 A.M on March 8 this year (it begins each year at 2 am on the second Sunday of March) and will officially end on Sunday November 1 at 2:00 am.
Following the same logic, the Daylight Saving Time will begin on March 14 and end on November 7 in 2010.
While for some the end of Daylight Saving Time means additional time later in the day, for others it will tantamount to an additional hour of slumber and waking up fully refreshed.
Daylight saving time is an extensively used system in the summer season whereby the official local time is moved forward by an hour.
The objective of such an adjustment is to make available a better match between the hours of daylight and the productive hours of work and school.
Some territories and states in the U.S like Arizona, Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands do not follow the ritual of Daylight Saving time. So for them, it will be business as usual.
Earlier this year Alaska passed a bill to stop following the Daylight Saving Time terming it as extraneous in the land of the midnight sun and a health hazard as it disturbs sleep.
A blog by a U.S resident suggests that he does not like the concept at all, "Changing clocks by one hour twice per year is one of the stupidest things practiced in the United States and in a large number of other countries. Hooray for Kazakhstan, India, and Arizona, who have chosen to not participate in this folly."
Daylight Saving Time does complicate international timekeeping, can upset meetings, travel, billing and conflict with the biological clock and disturb sleep patterns.
Brainchild of William Willet
William Willet, a well-known English draftsman and outdoorsman, concocted the idea of the Daylight Saving Time when he observed that most of the British slept through the best part of a summer day.
Being an enthusiastic golfer, he did not like to cut short his round at dusk. The way out to have best of all the world’s was to advance the clock during the summer months, a plan that he put forward in 1907.
The proposal saw many enactments, adjustments, and repeals before the World finally accepted it.