Daylight Savings Time 2015 Explained: When Will Clocks Go Forward and Change?
News on the upcoming Daylight Savings Time 2015 has began to proliferate the Internet as the end of winter approaches, and on the coming Sunday, people in the U.S. will be moving their clocks forward an hour.
With the Daylight Savings Time approaching, people in the Northern Hemisphere have started gearing themselves to wake up earlier than usual when they move their clocks forward on March 8.
While people may lose an hour of sleep each morning, they will be gaining an hour of daylight in the evening as the days to lengthen up until the summer solstice, which falls this year on June 21.
Moving clocks forward to later in the day will necessitate getting up an hour earlier, but allows people to enjoy more daylight hours in the evening and conserve more electricity until clocks are turned back an hour to Standard Time at the first Sunday of November.
Based on a mandate passed in Congress, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 requires a twice-a-year turning of clocks to gain an hour of daylight each day. In the U.S., Daylight Savings Time starts March 8, Sunday, and will end Nov. 8.
DST is practiced in more than 70 countries around the world, and was a brainchild of Benjamin Franklin who proposed daylight saving time back in 1784, an energy saving measure which was first utilized by Germany in 1916.
Known as "fast time" in the U.S., DST was passed as a law, the Standard Time Act, in March 1918. It was repealed a year later, but was reinstated at the onset of World War II until 1945. In 1966, it came into existence again in the form of the Uniform Time Act, for which Congress moved to an earlier February 23 start date in 1974 in the midst of the energy crisis.
In the U.S., only Arizona, Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa stick to standard time. In Europe, DST begins on the last Sunday of March, while Asia does not participate in the annual temporal engineering of time.
