'Early to bed, early to rise...'

On Sunday morning at 2 AM, October 31st, clocks will 'fall back' one hour, giving us an extra hour of sleep and marking the end of Daylight Savings Time which began in March.

Many people around the world welcome this change in the fall.  But the warm feeling isn't shared during daylight savings time in March when clocks 'spring forward' making many of us lose an hour of sleep.

The idea of DST, aligning waking hours to daylight hours, was first proposed by Benjamin Franklin in 1784 in order to economize on candle usage.  He coined the phrase, "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise".

But modern DST was ultimately 'invented' by George Hudson, who proposed it in 1895.  Hudson was an entomologist from New Zealand who valued the extra hours of daylight in the summer because it allowed him leisure time to collect insects.

In March 2019, the European Parliament voted to dispense entirely with biannual clock changes.  But the move lost steam due to the pandemic, brexit and other bureaucratic issues.  In a similar move, a group of senators in the US established the "Sunshine Protection Act of 2021" calling for an end to the hated clock changes.

They claimed that time changes contributed to higher rates of car crashes, workplace injuries, street crime, heart attacks and general crankiness.