Spring forward: Daylight saving time starts this weekend

On Sunday, March 12, at 2 a.m., clocks in most parts of the United States will spring forward one hour as daylight saving time (DST) begins, running until Sunday, Nov. 5, 2023. And even though this means losing one hour of sleep this weekend, you'll actually be gaining an extra hour of daylight in the evening.

AccuWeather has compiled all you need to know about the future of the century-long practice of moving back and forth between DST and standard time.

But could this year be the last ever daylight saving time?

A bill that would make daylight saving time permanent passed in the U.S. Senate in March 2022. The Sunshine Protection Act, however, stalled in the U.S. House, according to Congress.gov.

The bill was introduced by U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida in 2021, and he recently reintroduced the legislation. Rubio and other supporters of the bill cite reduced crime and car accidents among the reasons for making DST the permanent year-round standard. Advocates had hoped the law would take effect on Nov. 5, 2023.

Two states -- Arizona, with the exception of the Navajo territory, and Hawaii -- do not observe daylight saving time. Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, Guam and American Samoa don't follow it either.

American Founding Father and scientist Benjamin Franklin was the first person to hint at the idea of daylight saving time, from an economic perspective, in 1784 when he lived in Paris. He thought Parisians could save money on candles if they woke up at sunrise and went to bed as the sun set.

Over a century later, in 1895, New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson proposed a two-hour shift forward in October and a two-hour shift backward in March to the Wellington Philosophical Society. But this only led to heavy criticism and mocking, with some detractors calling it confusing.

It wasn't until 1916, two years into World War I, that DST was first implemented by Germany.

A selection of vintage clocks is displayed at Electric Time Company, Nov. 1, 2022, in Medfield, Massachusetts. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

The country decided to turn every clock in the country one hour ahead with the goal of minimizing the use of fuel for artificial lighting and saving it for war efforts. Soon after, other European countries such as Austria, France and the United Kingdom joined the practice.

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Pittsburgh native Robert Garland first introduced the idea to the U.S. in 1918, after he visited the U.K., and a bill was signed and approved by President Woodrow Wilson on March 8 of that same year.

But only seven months later, the war came to a close, and DST was repealed. It wasn't reintroduced until World War II. From the end of the war in 1945 until 1966, there was no uniformity in the use of DST in the country, which caused quite a bit of confusion.

That dilemma came to an end in 1966, when the Uniform Time Act of 1966 was implemented by the U.S. Department of Transportation, dividing the country into different time zones and setting the official start and end dates of DST in the country as March through November. Then, provisions of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 outlined that daylight saving time would start on the second Sunday in March and end on the first Sunday in November.

But after half a century, it remains to be seen whether the DST tradition of changing clocks every few months will live on or if the Sunshine Protection Act will prevail.

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