The Sydney Morning Herald
· collected 2026-10-03 · by Felicity Lewis, Angus Holland
It’s time once more for that twice-yearly shock to the system that is the clocks moving forward an hour.
asserted
clocks → ’ → system
You’ll wake to discover it’s an hour later than you’d expected, and you’re running late for brunch.
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you → wake → brunch
At 2am on the first Sunday in October, daylight saving begins in the Australian states that have it, and the clocks jump forwards.
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clocks → begin → it
At 3am on the first Sunday in April, daylight saving ends.
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saving → end → April
Time can be complicated.
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Time → complicate → ?
We agree to call the period that it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun a “year”, and also the time it takes the globe to spin once on its axis a “day”.
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globe → agree → axis
The precise length of a second has been another matter, as has been gaining worldwide agreement on precisely what time it should be where.
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it → gain → agreement
A workable, if imperfect, solution are the time zones that divide the globe into segments.
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that → divide → segments
Time shifts forwards (or backwards) as you cross a boundary from one zone to the next, usually by an hour, though not always.
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you → shift → hour
The solution is complicated by another division around the globe: nations.
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solution → complicate → globe
China, for example, has just one time zone stretching over 5000 kilometres east to west, meaning the sun rises at 6am in (east-coast) Shanghai but at 7.30am in (western) Chengdu.
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sun → have → Chengdu
It once had several zones to accommodate its vast girth, but the communist government scrapped that notion in 1949, leader Mao Zedong declaring a single time zone would aid national unity.
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zone → have → unity
India adopted one time zone after its independence from the British in 1947 and consequently, sunrise and sunset are earlier in, say, Kolkata than in Mumbai.
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sunrise → adopt → Mumbai
“Time zones are so interesting,” says Dr Emily Akkermans, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, in London, where she is the official curator of time.
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she → say → time
“I love studying the maps and tracing the time zone boundaries.
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I → study → boundaries
It’s great to look at these from different periods because this shows how they are not fixed and can be changed to reflect political, cultural or geographical priorities.
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they → ’ → priorities
Daylight saving time turns Australia’s three standard time zones into five.
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time → turn → five
Some people (mostly in Queensland and Western Australia) firmly reject the very notion; by contrast, there’s a push in Britain to wind clocks forwards during daylight saving, not just one hour but two – so-called Churchill Time, named for the former British PM’s initiative to make the most of productive daylight hours.
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people → reject → hours
In the United States, legislators passed a Sunshine Protection Act this year to “lock the clocks” and make daylight saving permanent.
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saving → pass → clocks
It has Donald Trump’s support but is yet to be decided on in the Senate.
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It → have → Senate
“People are sick and tired of having to change their clocks twice a year,” Trump said on social media.
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Trump → have → media
Where did daylight saving come from?
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saving → come → Where
Who invented time zones?
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Who → invent → zones
Why is the International Date Line so squiggly?
Where did daylight saving come from?
At 6 o’clock one February morning in 1784, American statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin was woken by noise at the Hotel de Valentinois in Paris.
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Franklin → come → Paris
Not typically an early riser, he was surprised to find his room filled with light.
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room → find → light
The previous night, he had been at a soirée where a new type of bright-burning oil lamp had been on show.
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type → burn → show
Come to think of it, how economical were the candles that night-owl Parisians routinely used for light?
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Parisians → come → light
He calculated that between any given March and September, they burned a total of 64 million pounds of wax and tallow for 128,100,000 hours: “An immense sum! that the city of Paris might save every year, by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles,” he wrote in a satirical letter to The Journal of Paris, suggesting that Parisians rise with the sun – and that a tax be put on window shutters.
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tax → calculate → shutters
Many years later, across the world in New Zealand, post-office shift worker and entomologist (insect expert) George Vernon Hudson had a serious idea about capturing the benefits of daylight.
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Hudson → have → daylight
He proposed “seasonal time”: a two-hour clock shift from October to March.
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He → propose → March
Milkmen might suffer, he told the Wellington Philosophical Society in 1898 (because winding clocks forwards would mean darker mornings) but they were a minority; anyone who regarded “an abundance of outdoor recreation” as key to “human health and happiness” would surely back the scheme.
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who → suffer → scheme
While New Zealand had been one of the first nations to standardise its time by reference to Greenwich, in 1868, it didn’t get on board with daylight saving until the 1920s.
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it → standardise → 1920s
The first place to formally “save daylight” is generally agreed to have been the town of Port Arthur in Ontario, Canada, today called Thunder Bay, in 1908, led by an amateur athletics fan and former teacher, businessman John Hewiston.
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place → save → fan
‘If some of the hours of wasted sunlight could be withdrawn from the beginning and added to the end of the day, how many advantages would be gained by all.’William Willett
Britain was first moved towards action by a builder who liked horseriding: William Willett, the great-great-grandfather of Coldplay singer Chris Martin (whose hit songs include Clocks).
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songs → waste → Clocks
Willett’s self-published pamphlet The Waste of Daylight put daylight saving on influential radars.
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pamphlet → publish → radars
Willett had been on a morning ride in Kent when he’d noticed that the blinds of most houses were still drawn.
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blinds → notice → houses
“Now, if some of the hours of wasted sunlight could be withdrawn from the beginning and added to the end of the day, how many advantages would be gained by all,” he wrote in 1907.
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he → waste → 1907
He lobbied for “British Summer Time”: for the clocks to be moved forwards by 80 minutes in four weekly increments from April, then backwards in September, which he calculated would “save” 210 hours of daylight a year.
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he → lobby → daylight
In the end, though, it was neither health nor leisure but conflict that kicked daylight saving into being.
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that → kick → being
“It is one of the paradoxes of history,” Winston Churchill later opined in a tribute to Willett, “that we should owe the boon [of daylight saving] to a war which plunged Europe into darkness for four years.”
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which → opine → years
…and 122 more, not listed.
The Aporia
