Daylight Saving Time returns and we can look forward to lighter evenings as the winter fades away. But precisely when and why do the clocks spring forward?
When did the clocks go forward?
Spring is officially here, the nights are becoming lighter, the temperature is getting (slightly) warmer – and on Sunday, 26 March 2017, we moved the UK move to British Summer Time: at 1am to be precise.
So what is Daylight Saving Time?
Daylight saving time (DST) or summer time is the practice of advancing clocks during summer months by one hour so that in the evening daylight is experienced an hour longer, and normal sunrise times are sacrificed.
Typically, regions with summer time adjust clocks forward one hour close to the start of spring and adjust them backward in the autumn to standard time.
Daylight Saving: Whose idea was it?
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 trialled 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.
He published a pamphlet called 'The Waste of Daylight' in a bid to get people out of bed earlier by changing the nation’s clocks.
Willett proposed moving the clocks backwards 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.
He then spent the rest of his life trying to convince people his scheme was a good one.
Willett died of the flu aged of 58 at his home near Bromley and is commemorated for his efforts by a memorial sundial in nearby Petts Wood, set permanently to Daylight Saving Time.
The Daylight Inn in Petts Wood is named in his honour and there's a road there called Willett Way.
Why do the clocks change?
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.
100th Anniversary in April 2016
Sadly, Willett died a year before Germany adopted his clock-changing plan on April 30, 1916, when the clocks were set forward at 11pm. 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.
The Home Office put out special posters telling people how to reset their clocks to GMT, and national newspapers also gave advice.
Even though Germany is commonly known as the first country to implement DST, Thunder Bay in Ontario, Canada had implemented DST in 1908.
Coldplay and the significance of 'Clocks'
William Willett is a great-great-grandfather of Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin.
This is Coldplay performing the song 'Clocks' from their 2002 album 'A Rush of Blood to the Head'. (There's also a song called 'Daylight' on there.)
Which countries use Daylight Saving Time?
EU countries which synchronise their DST include the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Bulgaria as well as most other European countries – including Norway and Switzerland.
A few European countries don't use DST at all: Russia, Iceland, Georgia, Armenia and Belarus.
Most of the United States begins Daylight Saving Time at 2am on March 13th.
Daylight Saving Time occurs in US states and territories except Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Island. Each US time zone switches at a different time.
Utah is considering the ending its participation in DST.
From 1986-2006, Daylight Saving Time in America began on the first Sunday in April and ended on the last Sunday in October. The current timetable for Daylight Saving Time was introduced on Aug 8th 2005, however, when President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act.
Many countries in the Northern Hemisphere (north of the equator) observe DST, but not all.
In the Southern Hemisphere the participating countries start DST between September and November and end between March and April.
How dark does the UK get in summer?
In the UK, the maximum 16 hours and 50 minutes of sunlight occurs on the longest day in June (the summer solstice) and dwindles to just seven hours and 40 minutes six months later in December (the winter solstice).
Has the time difference always been one hour?
Today clocks are almost always set one hour back or ahead, but throughout history there have been several variations, like half adjustment (30 minutes) or double adjustment (two hours), and adjustments of 20 and 40 minutes have also been used. A two-hour adjustment was used in several countries during the 1940s and elsewhere at times.
A half adjustment was sometimes used in New Zealand in the first half of the 20th century.
Australia's Lord Howe Island (UTC+10:30) follows a DST schedule in which clocks are moved 30 minutes forward to UTC+11, which is Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT) during DST.
In 1940 during the Second World War, the clocks in Britain were not put back by an hour at the end of Summer Time. In subsequent years, clocks continued to be advanced by one hour each spring and put back by an hour each autumn until July 1945.
During these summers, therefore, Britain was two hours ahead of GMT and operating on British Double Summer Time (BDST).
The clocks were brought back in line with GMT at the end of summer in 1945. In 1947, due to severe fuel shortages, clocks were advanced by one hour on two occasions during the spring, and put back by one hour on two occasions during the autumn, meaning that Britain was back on BDST during that summer.
Argument for scrapping Daylight Saving Time
Those against DST say its not clear if any energy savings are made while there are also potential health risks.
Critics claim that the darker mornings are dangerous for children walking to school and the energy saving argument may be invalid if people switch on fans and air-conditioning units during the lighter, warmer evenings. (But this is unlikely to bother people in the UK.)
In 2011, Tory MP Rebecca Harris floated a bill calling for year-round daylight savings but it failed to complete its passage through Parliament before the end of the session and was dropped.
A YouGov poll that same year found that 53pc of Britons supported moving clocks forward an hour permanently while 32pc opposed the change.
The proposals were met less warmly by the Scottish population; Alex Salmond called the campaign an attempt to “plunge Scotland into morning darkness" and his SNP colleague MP Angus MacNeil said any change would have "massive implications for the safety and wellbeing of everyone living north of Manchester".
"It is no secret that Tories in the south want to leave Scotland in darkness, but fixing the clocks to British summertime would mean that dawn wouldn't break in Scotland until nearly 9am," he said.
He had a point. Following a 1968 to 1971 trial, when BST was employed all year round northern Scotland saw a net increase in the number of people killed or seriously injured.
The sun wouldn’t rise until 10am in parts of Scotland and the country’s 1,000-or-so dairy farmers, who wake up before 5am, would have to work for hours in the dark.
Other farmers and construction workers, who need sunlight to perform their jobs, would end up having to work later into the evening.
Some folks keen to reach a compromise have suggested the clocks change at Hadrian's Wall and not at Calais.
Philip Broom writing on the National Farmer's Union website in 2011 said: "A definite no. Combining will not start until midday and then have to go on until 11 o’clock. Our day is long enough now."
An A Thomas, also writing on the NFU site, was worried that "younger people having loud parties or barbecues in gardens and youths hanging around on streets would make it a nightmare for people getting up for work early mornings."
Why we should keep Daylight Saving Time
The current system of changing the clocks at the end of March and October has been in place since 1972.
Those of not changing the clocks back in October say that it would reduce traffic accidents, save energy, boost tourism and encourage more people to exercise outdoors.
In the 1980s, the golf industry estimated that one extra month of daylight savings could generate up to $400 million (£246.6 million) a year in extra sales and fees.
Daylight Savings Time “affects everything from Middle-East terrorism to the attendance at London music halls, voter turnout to street crime, gardening to the profits of radio stations,” said David Prerau, author of Saving the Daylight: Why We Put the Clocks Forward.
This debate stretches years into the past, and the future of British time is still unclear.
A right royal wind-up...
Spare a thought for the staff of the Royal Collection. They spend over 50 hours adjusting over 1,000 clocks spread across the official residences of The Queen.
Following months of planning, staff at Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and the Palace of Holyrood house in Edinburgh start work in the early hours of the morning to ensure that the time is set accurately.
There are 379 timepieces at Windsor Castle, 500 at Buckingham Palace and 80 at the Palace of Holyroodhouse including organ clocks, astronomical clocks, musical clocks and mechanical clocks.
What was Sandringham Time (GMT+30mins)?
An added complication for Royal servants between the years 1901 to 1936 was the concept of 'Sandringham Time' which was introduced in by Albert, Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.
A keen fan of shooting, he wanted to make the most of winter daylight, so he ordered all clocks on the estate to be set half an hour fast.
The tradition was continued by King George V after he acceded to the throne in 1925 but King Edward VIII abolished it in 1936 shortly before his abdication.
20 famous clocks: Remember these?
With the clocks going forward this Sunday, now seems like a good time to take a look at some of the most iconic clocks in popular culture.