Daylight Saving Time Is National Groggy Day

(MYFOX NATIONAL) - National groggy day is almost here. Yes, winter is fading and so will your usual amount of sleep come Sunday morning, March 14.

That's when residents in nearly every U.S. state will move their clocks forward an hour for daylight saving time. Residents of Arizona, Hawaii, U.S. territories of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa do not deviate from standard time, according to the Web site Infoplease .

It's not a federal law to switch to daylight saving time, according to National Geographic . The government only requires that every state be on standard time as of 2 a.m. on the last Sunday in October.

The government also mandates that regions observing daylight saving time begin at the same time, according to the magazine .

The need for a more unified keeping of time took hold in the 19th century so standardized railroad schedules could be published, Bill Mosley, a public affairs officer at the U.S. Department of Transportation, told National Geographic.

The Interstate Commerce Commission originally managed the nation's time standards. That changed in 1966 when Congress moved the duty to the newly created DOT, National Geographic reported.

The U.S. railroad industry established official time zones in 1883 with a set standard time within each zone. Congress eventually signed the railroad time zone system into law in 1918.

Congress in 1966 passed the Uniform Time Act, which standardized the start and end dates for daylight saving time. It also allowed state legislatures to decide if their state would remain on standard time.

The next major change came in 1972, when an amendment extended the option not to observe daylight saving time to areas in separate time zones but within the same state.

Infoplease reports that from 1986 to 2006 daylight saving time lasted from the first Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October. That changed starting in 2007 to the second Sunday in March through the first Sunday in November.