Spring ahead this weekend

Daylight Saving Time begins this weekend.

That means clocks move ahead one hour at 2 a.m., Sunday, March 9.

Remember to change your clocks Saturday night. And change the batteries in your smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors, as well.

Daylight Saving Time is used to save energy and make better use of daylight.

While Germany and Austria were the first countries to use it in 1916, it is a little-known fact that a few hundred Canadians beat the German Empire by eight years. July 1, 1908, the residents of Port Arthur, Ontario, now Thunder Bay, turned their clocks forward by one hour to start the world's first Daylight Saving Time period. Other locations in Canada soon followed suit.

If you think Daylight Saving Time is a good idea, thank New Zealand scientist George Vernon Hudson and British builder William Willett. In 1895, Hudson presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour shift forward in October and a two-hour shift back in March. There was interest in the idea, but it was never followed through.

In 1905, independently from Hudson, Willett suggested setting the clocks ahead 20 minutes on each of the four Sundays in April, and switching them back by the same amount on each of the four Sundays in September, a total of eight time-switches per year.

Willett’s Daylight Saving plan caught the attention of British Member of Parliament Robert Pearce who introduced a bill to the House of Commons in February, 1908. The first Daylight Saving Bill was drafted in 1909, presented to parliament several times and examined by a select committee. However, the idea was opposed by many, especially farmers, so the bill was never made into a law.

Willett died in 1915, the year before the United Kingdom started using Daylight Saving Time in May, 1916. It is not known if he was aware that his idea had become a reality seven years prior to his death in a small town in Ontario.

Many sources also credit Benjamin Franklin with being the first to suggest seasonal time change. However, the idea voiced by the American inventor and politician in 1784 can hardly be described as fundamental for the development of modern Daylight Saving Time.

After all, it did not even involve turning the clocks. In a letter to the editor of the "Journal of Paris," entitled, “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light,” Franklin simply suggested that Parisians could economize candle usage by getting people out of bed earlier in the morning. What's more, Franklin meant it as a joke.

Although modern Daylight Saving Time has been used for about 100 years, ancient civilizations are known to have engaged in comparable practices thousands of years ago. For example, the Roman water clocks used different scales for different months of the year to adjust the daily schedules to the solar time.

Daylight Saving Time is now used in more than 70 countries worldwide and affects more than one-billion people every year.