For many people, it will simply mean an extra hour in bed. For others, it’s a disruption to their circadian rhythm that can take weeks to fix.
On Sunday at 2am, clocks in the UK will go back by an hour, a practice that has been mandated by law for more than a century.
A wealthy Kent builder called William Willett came up with the idea of “daylight saving” while he was out riding early on a summer morning in 1907.
Noting that most people still had their curtains drawn, shutting out the early morning light while they slept, it occurred to him that putting the clocks forward in spring would mean they could spend more of their waking hours in daylight.
His pamphlet, The Waste of Daylight, argued that advancing the time of sunrise would increase daylight recreation hours for workers and cut the cost of lighting homes, because of lighter evenings.
“His main argument was to increase health and wellbeing across the population but he also pointed out economic benefits to garner approval,” said Dr Emily Akkermans, curator of time at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.
Willett managed to get several prominent politicians onboard, including David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes novels, also supported the idea, which was discussed in parliament in 1908.
But the proposal was not adopted until after the outbreak of the first world war when changing the clocks to save daylight, boost productivity and reduce demand for coal suddenly seemed obvious – and not just to the British.
In 1916, Germany became the first country to bring in a daylight savings scheme and a few weeks later Britain followed suit.
Willett, who died of influenza in 1915, never experienced the change in clocks, but his idea has been picked up all over the world.
On Sunday, when clocks in the UK will move back an hour to Greenwich mean time (GMT), the sun will once again pass over the prime meridian at the Royal Observatory at midday.
Akkermans said: “In spring, the clock change forces us to get up an hour earlier, which makes us feel like we lose an hour. In autumn, we’re allowed to lie in an extra hour, which feels like a gain.”
In reality, she said “we do not really gain or lose anything” except daylight at either point in time. “In Greenwich we have about 16 hours of sunlight in the summer and only eight in winter. The clocks change to make the most of the varying amount of daylight hours we have throughout the year.”
She said the change to British summer time in spring, when clocks spring forward, was more disruptive to circadian rhythms than the change to GMT in autumn, when they fall back. “How people react to the clock changes varies – some people adjust relatively quickly, whereas for others it may disturb their circadian rhythms for weeks.”
