Every year some countries move their clocks forward in the spring, only to move them back in the autumn. To the vast majority of the world who doesn't participate in this odd clock fiddling – it seems a baffling thing to do. So what's the reason behind it?
The original idea, proposed by George Hudson, was to give people more sunlight in the summer. Of course, it's important to note that changing a clock doesn't actually make more sunlight – that's not how physics works.
But, by moving the clocks forward an hour, compared to all other human activity, the sun will seem to both rise and set later. The time when the clocks are moved forward is called Daylight Saving Time, and the rest of the year is called Standard Time.
This switch effectively gives people more time to enjoy the sunshine and nice summer weather after work. Hudson, in particular, wanted more sunlight so he could spend more time adding to his insect collection.
When winter is coming the clocks move back, presumably because people won't want to go outside anymore. But, winter doesn't have this affect on everyone.
If you live in a tropical place like Hawaii, you don't really have to worry about seasons because they pretty much don't happen. Every day, all year is sunny and beautiful, so christmas is just as good of a day to hit the beach as any other. As so, Hawaii is one of two states in the Union that ignore daylight saving time.
But, the further you travel from the equator in either direction the more the seasons assert themselves, and you get colder and darker winters, making summer time much more valuable to the locals. So it's no surprise that the further a country is from the equator the more likely it uses daylight saving time.
Hudson proposed his idea in Wellington in 1895 – but it wasn't well received and it took until 1916 for Germany to be the first country to put it into practice.
Though, the uber-industrious Germans were less concerned with catching butterflies on a fine summer evening than they were with saving coal to feed the war machine. The Germans thought daylight saving time would conserve energy. The reasoning goes that it encourages people to say out later in the summer and thus use less artificial lighting.
This sounds logical, and it may have worked back in the more regimented society of a hundred years ago, but does it still work in the modern world? That turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
