By LEONARD GRAY-Staff Reporter

LAPLACE – This weekend, it’s time once more to change the clocks back one hour, as Daylight Saving Time begins on Oct. 26 at 2 a.m.

During DST, clocks are turned forward an hour, effectively moving an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening. Next spring, on April 4, the clocks will move forward again.

The official spelling is Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time.

Saving is used here as a verbal adjective (a participle). It modifies time and tells us more about its nature; namely, that it is characterized by the activity of saving daylight. It is a “saving daylight” kind of time. Since “saving” is a verb describing a single type of activity, the form is singular.

Part of the confusion is because the phrase “Daylight Saving Time” is inaccurate, since no daylight is actually saved.

In the U.S., clocks change at 2 am local time. In spring, clocks spring forward from 1:59 am to 3 am; in fall, clocks fall back from 1:59 am to 1 am.

Nationwide, U.S. restaurants and bars have varied closing policies. In many states, liquor cannot be served after 2 a.m. But at 2 a.m. in the fall, the time switches back one hour. So, can they serve for that additional hour in October? The official answer is that the bars do not close at 2 a.m. but actually at 1:59 a.m. So, they are already closed when the time changes from Daylight Saving Time into Standard Time. In practice however, many establishments stay open an extra hour in the fall.

In the U.S., the changeover time was arbitrarily chosen to be 2 a.m., when most people are at home, and late enough to minimally affect bars and restaurants, and prevent the day from switching to yesterday (which would be confusing).

Also, it is early enough that the entire country has switched by daybreak, and the changeover occurs before most early shift workers and early churchgoers (particularly on Easter).

Daylight Saving Time, for the U.S. and its territories, is not observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, most of the Eastern Time Zone portion of the State of Indiana, and the state of Arizona (not the Navajo Indian Reservation, which does observe).

Many fire departments encourage people to change the battery in the smoke detector when they change their clocks, because it can be so easy to forget otherwise. More than 90 percent of homes in the United States have smoke detectors, but one-third are estimated to have wornout or missing batteries.

The idea of daylight saving was first conceived by Benjamin Franklin during his service as an American delegate in Paris in 1784, in an essay, “An Economical Project.”

The idea was first advocated seriously by a London builder, William Willett in the pamphlet “Waste of Daylight” that proposed advancing clocks 20 minutes on each of four Sundays in April, and retarding them by the same amount on four Sundays in September.

As he was taking an early morning a ride through Petts Wood, near Croydon, Willett was struck by the fact that the blinds of nearby houses were closed, even though the sun was fully risen.

For ages, people have measured time based on the position of the sun – it was noon when the sun was highest in the sky. Sundials were used well into the Middle Ages, when mechanical clocks began to appear. Cities would set their town clock by measuring the position of the sun, but every city would be on a slightly different time.

The time indicated by the apparent sun on a sundial is called Apparent Solar Time, or true local time. The time shown by the fictitious sun is called Mean Solar Time, or local mean time when measured in terms of any longitudinal meridian.

Britain was the first country to set the time throughout a region to one standard time. The railways cared most about the inconsistencies of local mean time, and they forced a uniform time on the country. By 1855 the vast majority of public clocks in Britain were set to Greenwich Mean Time.

Standard time in time zones was instituted in the U.S. and Canada by the railroads on Nov. 18, 1883. Before then, time of day was a local matter, and most cities and towns used some form of local solar time, maintained by some well-known clock (for example, on a church steeple or in a jeweler’s window).

The first man in the United States to sense the growing need for time standardization was an amateur astronomer, William Lambert, who as early as 1809 presented to Congress a recommendation for the establishment of time meridians in this country. Charles Dowd of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., tried in 1870. Dowd revised his proposal in 1872 and the revised proposal was adopted virtually unchanged by the railways of the U.S. and Canada 11 years later.

Detroit kept local time until 1900 when the City Council decreed that clocks should be put back 28 minutes to Central Standard Time. Half the city obeyed, half refused. After considerable debate, the decision was rescinded and the city reverted to Sun time. Then, in 1905, Central time was adopted by city vote.

It remained for a Canadian civil and railway engineer, Sandford Fleming, to instigate the initial efforts which led to the adoption of the present time meridians in both Canada and the United States. Time zones were first used by the railroads in 1883 to standardize their schedules. Fleming also played a key role in the development of a worldwide system of keeping time. Trains had made obsolete the old system where major cities and regions set clocks according to local astronomical conditions. Fleming advocated the adoption of a standard or mean time and hourly variations from that according to established time zones. He was instrumental in convening an International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington in 1884 at which the system of international standard time – still in use today – was adopted.

Daylight Saving Time has been used in the United States and in many European countries since World War I. At that time, in an effort to conserve fuel needed to produce electric power, Germany and Austria began saving daylight at 11 p.m. on April 30, 1916, by advancing the hands of the clock one hour until the following October. was immediately followed by other countries in Europe, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and Turkey, as were Tasmania, Nova Scotia, and Manitoba. Britian began three weeks later, on May 21, 1916. In 1917, Australia, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia initiated it.

The plan was not formally adopted in the United States until March 19, 1918. It both established standard time zones and set summer DST to begin on March 31, 1918. It placed the country on Daylight Saving Time for the remainder of WW I, and was observed for seven months in 1918 and 1919. The law, however, proved so unpopular that the law was later repealed in 1919 over President Wilson’s veto. It became a local option, and was continued in a few states (Massachusetts, Rhode Island) and some cities (New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and others).

During World War II, President Roosevelt instituted year-round Daylight Saving Time, called ‘War Time.’ (from Feb. 2, 1942 to Sept. 30, 1945). From 1945 to 1966, there was no federal law about Daylight Saving Time. So states and localities were free to choose whether to observe Daylight Saving Time and could choose when it began and ended. This, however, caused confusion – especially for the broadcasting industry, and for railways, airlines, and bus companies.television stations and the transportation companies had to publish new schedules every time a state or town began or ended Daylight Saving Time.

On Jan. 4, 1974, Nixon signed into law the Daylight Saving Time Energy Act of 1973. Then, beginning on Jan. 6, 1974, implementing the Daylight Saving Time Energy Act, clocks were set ahead for a 15-month period through April 27, 1975.

Now, under legislation enacted in 1986, Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. begins at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of April and ends at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday of October.