Daylight Saving Time (DST) ends Sunday, Nov. 7, at 2 a.m. Clocks will be set back one hour, giving us more daylight in the dark autumn and winter mornings. It's "fall back" time so set your clock back one hour before going to bed Saturday night. Don't worry about your cellphone as it automatically resets itself.

In the U.S., exceptions to DST are Arizona (except for the Navajo Nation), Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa.

By the way, the correct term is "Daylight Saving Time" and not "Daylight Savings Time" with an extra "s". The technical explanation is that the word "saving" is singular because it acts as part of an adjective rather than a verb.

According to the Farmer's Almanac, Benjamin Franklin may have been the first in the U.S. to propose the idea. Ben Franklin's "An Economical Project," written in 1784, is the earliest known proposal to "save" daylight. It was whimsical in tone, advocating laws to compel citizens to rise at the crack of dawn to save the expense of candlelight:

"Every morning, as soon as the Sun rises, let all the bells in every church be set ringing: and if that is not sufficient, let cannon be fired in every street to wake the sluggards effectually... . Oblige a man to rise at four in the morning, and it is probable that he will go willingly to bed at eight in the evening."

The first true proponent of Daylight Saving Time was an Englishman named William Willet. A London builder, he conceived the idea while riding his horse early one morning in 1907. He noticed that the shutters of houses were tightly closed even though the sun had risen. In "The Waste of Daylight," the manifesto of his personal light-saving campaign, Willet wrote, "Everyone appreciates the long, light evenings. Everyone laments their shrinkage as the days grow shorter; and nearly everyone has given utterance to a regret that the nearly clear, bright light of an early morning during Spring and Summer months is so seldom seen or used... . That so many as 210 hours of daylight are, to all intents and purposes, wasted every year is a defect in our civilization. Let England recognise and remedy it."

Willet spent a small fortune unsuccessfully lobbying businessmen, members of Parliament, and the U.S. Congress to put clocks ahead 20 minutes on each of the four Sundays in April, and reverse the process on consecutive Sundays in September.

Attitudes changed after World War I broke out. The government and citizenry recognized the need to conserve coal used for heating homes. The Germans were the first to officially adopt the light-extending system in 1915, as a fuel-saving measure during World War I. This led to the introduction in 1916 of British Summer Time: From May 21 to Oct. 1, clocks in Britain were put an hour ahead.

The United States followed in 1918, when Congress passed the Standard Time Act, which established the time zones. However, this was amid great public opposition. A U.S. government Congressional Committee was formed to investigate the benefits of Daylight Saving Time. Many Americans viewed the practice as an absurd attempt to make late sleepers get up early. Others thought that it was unnatural to follow "clock time" instead of "Sun time." A columnist in the Saturday Evening Post offered this alternative: "Why not 'save summer' by having June begin at the end of February?"

With public opinion in its favor, Congress officially declared that all clocks would be moved ahead one hour at 2:00 a.m. on March 31, 1918. (Canada adopted a similar policy later the same year.) Americans were encouraged to turn off their lights and go to bed earlier than they normally did - at around 8 p.m.

The Daylight Saving Time experiment lasted only until 1920, when the law was repealed due to opposition from dairy farmers (cows don't pay attention to clocks). No fewer than 28 bills to repeal Daylight Saving Time had been introduced to Congress, and the law was removed from the books. American had tolerated Daylight Saving Time for about seven months.

The subject did not come up again until after the attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, and the United States was once again at war.

During World War II, Daylight Saving Time was imposed once again (this time year-round) to save fuel. Clocks were set one hour ahead to save energy.

After the war (which concluded with Japan's final surrender on September 2, 1945), Daylight Saving Time started being used on and off in different states, beginning and ending on days of their choosing.

Inconsistent adherence to time zones among the states created considerable confusion with interstate bus and train service. To remedy the situation, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act in 1966, establishing consistent use of Daylight Saving Time within the United States: Clocks were to be set ahead one hour on the last Sunday in April and one hour back on the last Sunday in October.

That was the rule, but some state legislatures took exception via a loophole that had been built into the law. Residents of Hawaii and most of Arizona did not change their clocks. Residents of Indiana, which straddles the Eastern and Central time zones, were sharply divided on Daylight Saving Time: Some counties employed it, some did not.

In 1986, the U.S. Congress approved a bill to increase the period of Daylight Saving Time, moving the start to the first Sunday in April. The goal was to conserve oil used for generating electricity-an estimated 300,000 barrels annually. (In 2005, the entire state of Indiana became the 48th state to observe Daylight Saving Time.)

The current daylight saving period was established with the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which went into effect in 2007.

As of March 2021, an impressive 32 states have proposed bills to end the practice of switching clocks. However, the legislation can only go into effect if the federal law changes. The Uniform Time Act would need to be amended to allow such a change.

State Sen. Blake Stephens has been leading the charge in the Oklahoma legislature for "locking the clock." He introduced Senate Bill 843 in 2021 aimed at making the change to year-round daylight saving time, but it never got a vote. He said he plans to re-introduce it in February 2022.