Clocks Go Back Tonight

Society | October 28, 2017, Saturday // 11:08
Bulgaria: Clocks Go Back Tonight pixabay.com

The nights are getting longer, the days are getting darker quicker and the leaves are beginning to change colour. This can only mean one thing.

Autumn is officially here to mark the end of Daylight Saving Time and the approach of winter.

Why do we do this? According to wonderlopolis.org, daylight Saving Time (or “summer Time’ as it’s known in many parts of the world) was created to make better use of the long sunlight hours of the summer. By ‘springing’ clocks forward an hour in March, we move an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening. Of course, this reverses when they go back, meaning it gets dark earlier in the afternoon.

Daylight Saving: Whose idea was it?

Edwardian builder William Willett introduced the idea of British Summer Time, also known as Daylight Saving Time, in 1907.

A keen supporter of the outdoors, he noticed that during the summer people were still asleep when the sun had risen and wanted to stop Brits from wasting valuable daylight hours. Back then the clocks were set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) meaning it was light by 3am and dark at 9pm midsummer. 

Willett published a pamphlet called 'The Waste of Daylight' in a bid to get people out of bed earlier by changing the nation’s clocks, arguing it would not only improve health and happiness but it would save the country £2.5 million.

He proposed that the clocks should be advanced by 80 minutes in four incremental steps during April and reversed the same way during September. However, his idea was ridiculed and the Daylight Saving Bill got nowhere in Parliament when it was introduced in 1909. 

Willett, however, would not be deterred. He spent the rest of his life trying to convince people his scheme was a good one. Sadly, he died of the flu in 1915 at the age of 58; a year before Germany adopted his clock-changing plan on April 30, 1916 when the clocks were put forward at 11pm. Britain followed suit a month later on May 21 and Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and Turkey all followed.



Source: telegraph.co.uk

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Tags: spring, winter, autumn, clock

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