DAYLIGHT TIME ENDS; TURN CLOCK BACK HOUR

Daylight-savings time is nearing an end for 1994.

Americans will gain back the hour they lost last spring when they set their clocks back this weekend.

It's the annual "fall back" change that will occur officially at 2 a.m. Sunday, but most people will elect to change the clocks before going to bed tonight.

The change this weekend back to "slow time" ends the 7-month-long period of "fast time" that provided an extra hour of daylight in the evening. Sunday's change will return the extra hour of sleep that was lost in April.

After the time change occurs Sunday, the most noticeable effect will be in the evenings. The sun will set at around 5 o'clock instead of 6, and it will be dark by 6 instead of 7.

There was a time in history when people had to keep watch on more than the clock on time switches. During the mid-1960s, only 15 states observed daylight-savings time. A traveler could be an hour early, or an hour late, for an appointment without trying.

The Southeast Missouri-Southern Illinois area was a good example of the confusion.

Illinois observed daylight-saving time while Missouri favored standard time, and crossing the Mississippi River could put a person behind, or ahead, before Missouri adopted the daylight-savings time in the late 1960s.

All the confusion finally caught the attention of Congress, and bills were introduced in 1967 requiring states using daylight time to make the changeover on the last Sunday in April and October. States maintained the option of daylight-savings time but by 1969, only three states -- Michigan, Hawaii, and Arizona -- weren't observing it.

In 1986, President Reagan signed a bill, effective in 1987, that moved the start of daylight time to the first Sunday in April, with standard time starting the final Sunday in October.

Daylight-saving time was first practiced in the United States in 1918, when Congress adopted it as a part of the World War I effort to save energy. Six months later, daylight-savings time was scrapped.

In 1942, Congress put the nation on "War Time," which called for setting the clocks ahead one hour. Following World War II, Congress repealed War Time, but a half-dozen states maintained the daylight-saving times.

During the years of the big energy crises in the mid-1970s, the United States observed daylight- saving time from January through October in 1974 and February through October in 1975. The United States returned to the seven-month daylight-saving observance -- April through October -- in 1976.

The idea of daylight-saving time dates back to Benjamin Franklin, in 1784. Franklin proposed daylight-savings time when he was U.S. minister to France.

Franklin calculated that Parisians needlessly burned candles for 1,281 hours during the spring and summer and could save if they would accept the daylight-saving program.

Paris laughed him down.

The idea resurfaced in 1907, when Englishman William Willett introduced bills in the House of Commons calling for turning the clocks ahead in summer months. His bills died in committee.

Each year as time to adjust the clocks comes around, fire chiefs throughout the area suggest that people change the batteries in their smoke detectors.

Local fire chiefs, the International Association of Fire Chiefs, and the American Burn Association point out that nearly 80 percent of all American homes now have smoke detectors, but as many as half of them are inoperative because of dead batteries.

Fire officials say the weekend switch from daylight to standard time is the perfect time to install new batteries in home smoke detectors, and to make sure flashlight batteries are fully charged in the event of an emergency.