UK returns to normal time

The UK summertime officially ends in October, and the clocks go back to make mornings slightly lighter and evenings darker.

According to christianpost.com report, on Oct. 25 at 2:00 am, the time will change, which means that one will have a shorter night out, if one is clubbing until the wee hours, but gets an extra hour in bed on Sunday morning. To keep in mind how one should set the watch, there's a useful mnemonic: “ spring forward, fall back ” which will guide one through.

In 1907, William Willett, an Englishman introduced the idea of British Summer Time, also known as Daylight Saving Time, or DST, to prevent people from wasting valuable hours of light during the summer mornings.

Willett had also published a pamphlet called " The Waste of Daylight" in a bid to get people out of bed earlier by changing the country’s clocks. He proposed, during April, the clocks should be advanced by 80 minutes in four incremental steps and reversed the same way during September. After getting it published, he spent the rest of his life convincing people that his scheme was a good one, said the telegraph.uk report.

Germans adopted his clock-changing plan on April 30, 1916, when all the clocks were set forward at 11 pm and Britain also followed it a month later on May 21; but sadly, the genius died the year before at the age of 58.

This idea became popular during the First World War from 1914 to 1918, when Britain and Germany were fighting each other. Therefore, any system that could take pressure off the economy was worth looking forward to. The Summer Time Act of 1916 was then quickly passed by the Parliament as well as the first day of British Summer Time, May 21, 1916, was widely reported in the press.

A half adjustment, or 30 minutes 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, or AEDT, during DST.

However, the idea was not a novel one and it was George Vernon Hudson , an entomologist in New Zealand, who came up with the idea in 1895, to the Wellington Philosophical Society outlining a daylight saving scheme which was trialed successfully in the country in 1927.

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