A reader writes:

Hey, what's the point of daylight savings time? It's so hard to remember when it happens, and everyone's an hour late to everything when it does. I'll bet it costs this country billions of dollars.
--Jeremy, Seattle

Jeremy, you ask a good question. But you need to know a little something: It's daylight saving time -- not savings. Daylight savings makes it sound like a department-store sale. Prices WILL go up when the sun goes down. Hurry! Who needs that? Not me, not you.

Don't feel bad, though. Before I started researching the answer to your question, I also said "daylight savings."

You're not the only person out there who doesn't love daylight saving time. Have you ever read anything by Canadian novelist Robertson Davies? He had this to say about the practice:

I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind.... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, 1947, XIX, Sunday

And he makes an excellent point: daylight saving time doesn't actually save daylight. It's a stupid name, really. I never know whether we're in daylight saving time (when we "spring ahead") or standard time (when we "fall back"). Outside the United States, many people use the term summer time for what we call daylight saving time, which makes a lot more sense because it happens during the summer. So, while daylight saving time has been an utter failure in actually saving any daylight (for a rainy night, perhaps?), it does accomplish three things, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation:

• It saves energy. When we're awake, we're more likely to have our TVs, VCRs, and lights on (among other home appliances). By shifting the hours we're likely to be awake to correspond with the daylight outside, we're less likely to have the lights on, so we use less electricity.
• It saves lives. When people's waking hours correspond with daylight hours, they're safer. Traffic accidents, for example, are less likely when it's light out.
• It cuts down on crime. Crime tends to happen after dark. As is the case with accidents, people are less likely to fall victim to crime when their waking hours are synched up with the sun.

And that's why most of the United States and many other countries take part in the twice-yearly clock-adjusting ritual. Most, but not all. More on that later.

OK, so we've uncovered some good reasons for daylight saving time. But who came up with the idea, and what were the reasons? When I got your question, I had no idea how interesting it would be to find the answer. Before starting my research, I asked my mom and my husband why they thought we messed with our clocks twice yearly.

"It has something to do with farmers and cows," my mom said.

"It was about Richard Nixon," my husband said.

And I'd always thought it was Ben Franklin's idea.

It turns out, we were all a little bit right.

I looked up daylight saving time in Encarta Encyclopedia and confirmed right off the bat that it was an idea first suggested by Benjamin Franklin. The Encarta article also included a link to an in-depth essay from the California Energy Commission that explained how daylight saving time cuts down on our energy use and improves safety.

The essay went on to give an interesting history of the practice. According to the essay, an Englishman named William Willett brought Franklin's idea back to life in 1907 after he noticed houses with their shades drawn during the daytime. He considered this "a waste of daylight."

The idea didn't get anywhere until 1916, however, when England figured out during World War I that the country could save energy by changing the clock. The United States followed suit in 1918 -- but people hated it (especially farmers) and the law was repealed. Until World War II, that is. (Nothing like a war to get your priorities straight, I guess.)

But the tweaking didn't stop there. In 1973, when Nixon was president and the OPEC oil embargo was in place, Congress enacted a special, two-year daylight saving period. It wasn't continued in 1975 because agricultural states didn't like it.

In 1986, Ronald Reagan made another change -- moving the start of daylight saving to the first Sunday in April. It used to start on the last Sunday in April, but moving it up lets us save even more oil.

But wait -- there's more! This year, daylight saving time starts on the second Sunday of March (March 9) and ends on the first Sunday of November, making it start three weeks earlier and end one week later, presumably saving even more energy.

Once I'd read the Encarta article and the Energy Commission essay, I felt like I had everything I needed to know about daylight saving except one thing: which places in the United States don't abide by it. To me, the resistance is weird. And I cannot resist weird things.

So, I did a Web search on "daylight saving time." Here are the holdout states: Hawaii and Arizona. Until April of 2006, Indiana was a holdout as well, with THREE different time arrangements. Now all of Indiana observes daylight saving time.

Yes, this was totally confusing. The full explanation, including a map, can be found on a really excellent site called Web Exhibits. Leave it to Hoosiers to do things their own way, I guess.

I hope that answers your question, Jeremy!