No more changing clocks? History says be careful what you wish for on daylight saving time.

Electric Time technician Dan LaMoore puts a clock hand onto a 1,000-pound, 12-foot-diameter clock constructed for a resort in Vietnam. (Elise Amendola/AP)

Americans turned their clocks forward an hour Sunday for what some hope will be the last time, as bipartisan momentum builds for making daylight saving time permanent.

As The Post’s Capital Weather Gang notes, a bill spearheaded by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has united lawmakers from opposite parties who can’t agree on much of anything these days. It also builds upon legislation already passed in 16 states — both red and blue — and current debates in states such as Nevada. All of it reflects apparently real momentum behind the effort.

But as most of us bemoan our messed-up sleep schedules on the first Monday after losing an hour, it’s worth a little history lesson: We’ve tried this before, and it didn’t go over well. Whatever momentary mental anguish you’re experiencing right now, there are huge trade-offs that many or most Americans have previously decided aren’t worth the switch.

The year was 1973, and the United States was experiencing an energy crisis. Among the proposals put forward by President Richard M. Nixon in a November address was making daylight saving time permanent for the next two winters. Despite scant evidence of daylight saving time’s past benefit on the energy supply (dating back to DST’s various introductions since World War I), Americans really liked the idea. Polling in November and December 1973 showed strong and in some cases overwhelming support — 57 percent in a Gallup poll, 74 percent in a Louis Harris and Associates poll, and 73 percent in a poll from the Roper Organization.

The policy was quickly implemented in early January 1974. But it just as quickly fell out of favor.

Daylight saving time was created to make better use of sunlight during the summer. But as days get shorter in winter, many people experience depression. (Video: Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

In a Roper poll conducted in February and March, just 30 percent remained in favor of year-round daylight saving time, while a majority favored switching times again. Louis Harris polling in March showed just 19 percent of people said it had been a good idea, while about twice as many — 43 percent — said it was a bad one.

A big reason for the about-face? Whatever benefits might have been gleaned by giving people more sunlight in the evening during the winter, it also meant longer, darker mornings. Parents were suddenly sending their kids to school in the cold and the dark for months on end. As the Capital Weather Gang noted, such a change means the sun wouldn’t rise before 8 a.m. in Washington for more than two and a half months, between late November and mid-February. The morning darkness would linger even longer farther north.

Polling later that year — after the dark mornings had waned — was more mixed, with an Opinion Research poll in September showing 31 percent of people strongly favored the idea and 42 percent strongly opposed it. But even that wasn’t good. And the idea was abandoned shortly before the next round of morning darkness would descend in the winter of 1974-1975.

A Department of Transportation study at the time concluded that the change actually had minimal impact on saving energy and might have actually increased gasoline consumption. As Michael Downing, the author of a book on daylight saving time, wrote in the New York Times in 2005:

This decision did not soften the blow of the OPEC oil embargo, but it did put schoolchildren on pitch-black streets every morning until the plan was scaled back. A Department of Transportation study concluded that Nixon’s experiment yielded no definitive fuel saving. It optimistically speculated, however, that daylight saving might one day help us conserve as many as 100,000 barrels of oil a day.

Downing and others have highlighted a number of other problems not just with year-round daylight saving time, but even with past efforts by Congress to extend it. Among them:

• It puts clocks out of sync with Europe, which has standard time between late October and late March, creating problems in the trade and travel sectors.
• It makes it more difficult for various religions to practice rituals at home, such as sunrise prayers for Jews.
• It might actually increase gasoline consumption, given that people will have more time in the evening to go outside.
• Despite the widespread belief that it’s meant to benefit farmers, they actually really dislike it and have consistently lobbied against it since World War I.

What’s more, it’s not actually clear there is much momentum behind this idea in the broader American public right now — or at least, nowhere near as much as there was in 1973.

An AP-NORC poll in 2019 is the most recent to have tested this. It showed Americans generally liked the idea of keeping the clocks constant. But while 31 percent wanted them to be on daylight saving time constantly, 40 percent wanted them set to standard time and left there.

A 2010 poll for “60 Minutes” gave people a more binary choice: extend daylight saving time year-round, or don’t. They decided against it 58 percent to 37 percent.

It remains to be seen how much this idea will truly catch on. But as the 1970s demonstrated, it’s a lot more attractive when you’re sleep-deprived and when the days are relatively long. Perhaps not so much when there’s less daylight to be “saved” and you start your work or school day in the dark.