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An idea Benjamin Franklin came up with more than 200 years ago is why summer days today seem so very, very long.

Nearly everyone’s heard the expression “Spring forward, fall back.” Each spring most Americans move their clocks forward one hour. When so-called standard time returns each fall, they reset them back one hour. (Indiana’s a different story, but we’ll get to that.)

A TRICK OF THE LIGHT
Wait a minute! How can you “save” daylight at all?

Well, actually, we just call it daylight-saving time. A more accurate description would be “daylight-shifting time,” as a Web site called WebExhibits points out.

Because of the changing seasons, we already have more daylight hours in the summer. Seasons change because the earth is tilted 23.5 degrees on its axis. Depending on how far north or south of the equator you live, you get longer periods of daylight in the summer and shorter periods in the winter.

Now, if you set clocks forward one hour in the summer on top of all that extra sunlight, you get the sensation of even longer days. Assume the sun comes up at 5 a.m. and sets at 8 p.m. on standard time. If you shift the clocks forward, sunrise comes at 6 a.m. and sunset at 9 p.m. If you don’t get up until 7 a.m. anyway, when sunrise comes makes no difference to you. But you sure could make use of sunset coming an hour later! That’s how daylight-saving time works.

Countries on the equator get about the same amount of daylight in summer and winter, so there’s no reason for them to change to daylight-saving time.

Except for having an extra hour to play outside, why care about daylight-saving time?

One reason is saving energy. When it’s light later, you can wait to turn on a lamp. Longer daylight hours also appear to deter crime, according to the WebExhibits Web site, since criminals prefer the cover of darkness.

A FORWARD THINKER
The concept of daylight-saving time seems to have begun with Benjamin Franklin. Franklin wrote the saying “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” but he actually liked sleeping in. That was until the morning in Paris when Franklin awoke at 6 a.m. and was surprised to discover his room filled with sunlight.

Franklin thought Parisians could save money by going to bed earlier, getting up earlier and burning fewer candles. He wrote a humorous pamphlet to that effect in 1784. But daylight-saving time’s time hadn’t come, and Franklin’s suggestion went nowhere.

An Englishman, William Willett, revived the idea in 1907. He was maddened by how many hours of daylight were wasted while people slept. Wouldn’t it be great to transfer some of the hours to the evenings, saving on electricity and fuel and making evening work safer, too? Willett wanted clocks set forward 80 minutes.

Although Willett’s idea was introduced in Parliament in 1909, it was in the United States that his idea really caught on. (Called “Summer Time” there, Great Britain didn’t adopt daylight-saving time until 1925, 10 years after Willett’s death.)

During World War I, the United States passed a law standardizing time zones and establishing daylight-saving time, to begin on March 31, 1919. The law put the country’s clocks ahead by 60 minutes for the rest of World War I and for seven months in 1918 and 1919.

The law proved unpopular, mostly because people rose and went to bed earlier than we do today. Daylight-saving time was repealed in 1919 over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto. A few states and cities decided to continue saving daylight on their own, including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York City, Philadelphia and Chicago.

World War II brought daylight-saving time back. Called “War Time,” it lasted all year round. It ended with the war, ushering in a confusing time when localities could decide for themselves whether to observe daylight-saving time.

THE SUN RISES ON DST
In 1966, the Uniform Time Act passed in the United States, establishing daylight-saving time (abbreviated DST) nationwide.

But that wasn’t the final word. During a gasoline shortage in 1973, most of the United States went on extended daylight-saving time for two years to save energy.

While saving energy, the new time drew protests from farming states. Congress dropped the experiment in 1975.

Farmers feared their work days, based on nature’s clock, would get out of sync with work days that other people kept, said Gary Huddleston, public relations director for the Kentucky Farm Bureau.

“When the concept first came up, it was very controversial in the rural areas, but that is no longer the case,” he said. “The old, original DST argument has kind of disappeared.”

The bigger problem nowadays, he said, is trying to track the time between Kentucky’s two time zones. The state’s split roughly in half, with the eastern half in the Eastern Time Zone and the western part in the Central Time Zone — one hour later.

FAST TIMES IN INDIANA
In some ways, Indiana’s in a zone of its own. Or three. By law, most of the state stays on Eastern Standard Time all the time.

Five counties in northwestern Indiana, however, are in the Central Time Zone and switch to Central Daylight Time in summer. Two counties in southeastern Indiana and three more across the Ohio River from Louisville are in the Eastern Time Zone and switch to Eastern Daylight Time.

If you’ve heard of “fast time” and “slow time,” you’ve run into time changes in Southern Indiana. So-called “fast time” is Louisville time. “Slow time” is the time in Indiana after Louisville changes to daylight-saving time.

Two other states skip the switch to daylight-saving time. They’re Hawaii and Arizona, although the Navajo Nation, which is partly in Arizona, goes on daylight-saving time.

About 70 other nations observe daylight-saving time. Of the major industrialized countries, Japan’s the only one that doesn’t.

Sources: “Daylight Saving Time” (http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/index.html) “Time Zone” and “Daylight Savings Time,” Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2003 (http://encarta.msn.com).