Daylight Saving Time ends Sunday

This weekend is that one time of the year when people get that 25-hour day many have been craving.

Daylight saving time officially ends Sunday morning at 2 a.m. when clocks are moved back one hour to 1 a.m.

Most people make the change when they go to bed Saturday night.

Not everyone remembers. Studies have shown most people remember "spring ahead," but a smaller percentage of the population remembers to "fall back."

Ben Franklin was the first person to propose daylight savings time. While serving as U.S. ambassador to France in Paris, Franklin wrote to a Paris newspaper describing the resources that might be saved if he and others rose before noon and burned less midnight oil.

It wasn't until World War I that daylight saving was adopted on a grand scale. Germany was the first, the concept designed to reduce artificial lighting and thereby save coal for the war effort. Friends and foes soon followed suit.

In the United States, a federal law standardized the yearly start and end of daylight saving time in 1918 -- for the states that chose to observe it. The federal government doesn't require U.S. states or territories to observe daylight saving time, which is why residents of Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Marianas Islands won't need to turn back their clocks this weekend.

During World War II, the United States made daylight saving time mandatory for the whole country as a way to save wartime resources. Between Feb. 9, 1942, and Sept. 30, 1945, the government took it a step further, observing it year-round and essentially making it the new standard time, if only for a few years.

Thirty years later, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 was enacted, mandating a month-long extension of daylight saving time, starting in 2007. Since the end of World War II, daylight saving time has always been optional for U.S. states. But its beginning and end have shifted and occasionally disappeared.

For many people, daylight saving time is a chance to take part in evening activities that require daylight. But the reason given for its creation in the modern era is to save energy.