SEATTLE- Well, it’s that time of year to say goodbye to the afternoon light.

When Americans go to bed on Saturday night, they get an extra hour of sleep. In the United States, clocks change early Sunday morning at 2 a.m

Sunset in Seattle will be at 4:47 p.m. on Sunday, but the days will continue to get shorter until the winter solstice on December 21st.

The annual time change comes even as lawmakers in Washington push to move the state to daylight saving time permanently.

Gov. Jay Inslee signed a law in 2019 that would have allowed the state to move to permanent daylight saving time.

But the Sunshine Protection Act has stalled at the federal level. Without congressional approval, the legislation remains in limbo.

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A University of Washington professor was part of a coalition of sleep doctors last year who urged the federal government to eliminate daylight saving time.

Many people agree that they don’t like having to change their clocks twice a year, whether they go forward or back. However, the main argument seems to be whether a permanent standard time is the answer.

So why do we even have daylight saving time? Here are a few facts about the timer.

Who had the idea to change the clocks? It depends on who you ask

The founding of DST is often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who first wrote about the idea in a letter to the editor Journal de Paris in 1784. Franklin simply suggested that Parisians should get up earlier to save money on lamp oil and candles, and more importantly, he wrote it as satire.

If you like daylight saving time as we know it today, you can thank New Zealand scientist George Vernon Hudson, who in 1895 presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society that suggested a two-hour shift forward in October and a two-hour shift back in March. Although there was interest in Hudson’s proposal and he wrote another article on it in 1898, the idea never came to fruition.

In 1905, a man named William Willett came up with the idea of ​​setting clocks forward in the summer to take advantage of daylight in the mornings and brighter evenings. Willett’s idea was taken up by some legislators who introduced legislation, but it was met with strong opposition, and Willett died in 1915 before his idea could become a reality.

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Germany was the first country to introduce summer time

Daylight saving time was first introduced in Germany in 1916 during World War I to replace artificial lighting and thus save fuel for the war effort. Great Britain and many countries on both sides, including the USA, quickly followed

Many countries returned to standard time after World War I, and it was not until World War II that daylight saving time returned and remained for many countries.

The Uniform Time Law

Daylight saving time was not standardized in the United States until the passage of the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which gave the federal government control over the time change.

The time change has now been implemented in over 70 countries worldwide. Currently, most of the United States observes daylight saving time, with the exception of Hawaii and most of Arizona, as well as the U.S. island territories of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Guam.

The time frame used to be different

In the United States, daylight saving time begins on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November. But that wasn’t always the case.

According to AARP, before the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which took effect in 2007, daylight saving time was in effect from early April to late October.

It takes a toll on your health

According to sleep experts, losing an hour of sleep every March can have a negative impact on your well-being.

“The change to daylight saving time has been linked to an increase in heart attacks, strokes, traffic deaths and workplace accidents – and some sleep experts have called for an end to the change,” according to the AARP.

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Washington isn’t the only state that wants to stop changing the time

In recent years, at least 19 states have either enacted laws or passed resolutions to observe daylight saving time year-round. Implementing this change, however, would require an update to federal law dating back to the Uniform Time Act.

Under this law, states can either observe daylight saving time as currently practiced or stick with standard time year-round — meaning there is no easy shortcut for those hoping for a permanent shift forward.

Like it or not, you need to remember to set your clocks back an hour at 2 a.m. on Sunday, November 3rd