Texas: It's Time To Fall Back, Turn Your Clocks Back By One Hour

AUSTIN, TX — The end of daylight saving time is nigh, so don't forget to turn your analog clocks back by one hour.

We live in a wondrous age where our computers, cellphones, DVRs and other trappings of modern life do this for us automatically. But what of those who own grandfather clocks? Or those who enjoy the whimsy of cuckoo clocks? There are some among us who still have those old-school, wind-up alarm clocks by our bedside too that will require manual adjustment. Who but they to set them back by an hour?

To be exact, the end of daylight time occurs early Sunday, Nov. 5, when 1:59:59 a.m. will automatically — like magic from an autumnal fairy — will become 1 a.m.

Woo-hoo! An extra hour of sleep!

This means an hour of daylight is switched from evening to morning as standard time is ushered in. Depending on your outlook on this, you can either credit or blame Benjamin Franklin for this autumnal ritual that — like the old-school, wind-up alarm clocks some insist on holding onto well into the 21st century — is a holdover from the past.

In his 1784 paper An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light, Franklin lobbied for the daylight saving time idea after noticing that while people burned candles at night, they slept past dawn. Yet it wouldn't be until World War I that the idea was revisited, as daylight saving time was implemented with passage of the Calder Act as a way of conserving fuel.

Another Franklin — Franklin D. Roosevelt, that is — would later implement a year-round daylight saving time known in the parlance of the time as "war time." Lyndon B. Johnson would later sign the Uniform Time Act into law, allowing states and territories to opt out of DST.

Some took LBJ up on his offer, and the practice of turning back clocks isn't practiced in Arizona (save for the Navajo Nation), American Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Worldwide, some 70 countries observe DST.

What's interesting about this entire thing is that Franklin (a known bon vivant) may have been pulling out collective leg as it relates to his original idea, as National Geographic magazine points out. In his letter to the Journal of Paris, he noted his astonishment to see the sun already up as he awoke at 6 a.m.

“I saw it with my own eyes," Franklin wrote at the time. "And, having repeated this observation the three following mornings, I found always precisely the same result.”

Then the ambassador to France, Franklin argued money would be saved if people rose naturally with the sun while going to bed earlier at night — thus replacing hours of expensive candle use with free morning daylight. Before electricity, don't you know, candles were the most relied on to illuminate a room.

Oh, and just to be clear: It's Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time. Enjoy your extra hour of sleep, and may you have sweet, extended dreams!

>>> Image of the type of old-school, ever reliable wind-up clock on which many of us stubbornly continue to rely via Shutterstock