NORFOLK, Va. — A trip into our 13News Now archives back to 1991 shows former anchor Sandra Parker interviewing a clockmaker named Sam Earl in Smithfield.
While Daylight Saving Time is supposed to help us make better use of natural daylight, the practice didn’t help Earl with the hundreds of clocks he owned.
“This is not my favorite time for clock setting,” he noted back then.
This Sunday, November 7, we will set our clocks back an hour as Daylight Saving Time comes to an end. Most of us won’t have to worry about physically setting them because our computers, smartphones, and cars all do that automatically.
But you don’t have to go back to 1991 to see that that wasn’t always the case.
The Daylight Saving Period we currently use -- turning clocks forward on the second Sunday in March and turning them back on the first Sunday in November -- was established with the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
When it went into effect in 2007, we were still working through advances in technology. An ABC News report from our archives details the headache brought on by millions of out-of-sync computers across the country.
Because the time changes weren’t automatic on our phones and computers yet, there was a lot of confusion, time, and money wasted on setting things straight again.
Some of those frustrations are why 33 states have now introduced legislation to stop changing the time, and according to an Associated Press poll from 2021, 71 percent of Americans say it’s time to “lock the clocks.”