The clocks will change on Sunday, March 27, when we move to British Summer Time (BST) – at 2 am, to be precise. The clocks will move forward an hour (if in doubt, remember the Americanised mantra: spring forward, fall back). We will remain under BST until Sunday, October 30, when the clocks go back an hour and we return to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
Whose idea was it – and why do the clocks change? During the nine years he spent as American ambassador to France, American inventor and politician Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay titled An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light to the editor of The Journal of Paris in 1784. In the essay, he suggested that Parisians could reduce candle usage by getting people out of bed earlier in the morning, making use of the natural morning light instead. More than one hundred years later, in 1895, an entomologist in New Zealand, George Vernon Hudson, outlined a daylight saving scheme to the Wellington Philosophical Society, which was trialed successfully in the country in 1927. William Willett was the man who introduced the idea of Daylight Saving Time in Britain in 1907. He was keen to prevent people from wasting vital hours of light during summer mornings. Willett proposed moving the clocks backward and forwards by 80 mins, setting the clocks ahead 20 minutes on each of the four Sundays in April, and switching them back by the same amount on each of the four Sundays in September, a total of eight-time switches per year. Supporters for the proposal argued that such a scheme could reduce domestic coal consumption and increase the supplies available for manufacturing and the war effort during the First World War. Willett spent the rest of his life trying to convince people his scheme was a good one. Sadly, he died a year before Germany adopted his clock-changing plan on April 30, 1916, when the clocks were set forward at 11 pm. Britain followed suit a month later on May 21. By then Britain and Germany had been fighting each other in the First World War (1914-18), and a system that could take pressure off the economy was worth trying. The Summer Time Act of 1916 was quickly passed by Parliament and the first day of British Summer Time, 21 May 1916, was widely reported in the press. Back then the hands on many of the clocks could not be turned back without breaking the mechanism. Instead, owners had to put the clock forward by 11 hours when Summer Time came to an end.
