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Did You Know?

The Man Who Invented Daylight Saving Was Laughed At, and He Only Wanted to Catch Moths

On 15 October 1895, a twenty-eight-year-old clerk at the Wellington Post Office stood up in front of the Wellington Philosophical Society and read a paper titled On seasonal time-adjustment in countries south of lat. 30°.

His name was George Vernon Hudson. He was an entomologist — a very good one, who would eventually assemble the largest insect collection in New Zealand. His job at the post office was shift work, which left him daylight hours to go out looking for moths. But in summer, dusk arrived too early to be useful after a normal working day.

So he proposed the obvious solution: move the clocks forward two hours between October and March, and back again afterwards. He argued it would use the wasted early morning light, cut "the excessive use of artificial light which at present prevails," and give people "a long period of daylight leisure... for cricket, gardening, cycling, or any other outdoor pursuit desired."

The Society laughed at him.

One member said it was out of the question to alter a system that had been in use for thousands of years. Another asked, apparently sarcastically, whether clocks would need two sets of hands. A third called the idea wholly unscientific and impracticable.

The minutes record Hudson's reply: he was sorry to see the paper treated with ridicule, he had intended it to be practical, and it was approved of by those much in the open air.

Then he went back to his insects.

The clock: he was right, and it took a very long time to matter.

Hudson presented a second paper in 1898. In England, William Willett arrived at the same idea independently and published The Waste of Daylight in 1907; he died in 1915 without seeing it adopted. Germany implemented it first, in 1916, to save coal in wartime — and within six weeks a dozen countries had copied a German administrative order.

New Zealand itself did not pass the Summer-Time Act until 1927 — thirty-two years after Hudson's paper. And when it finally came, he got one hour, not the two he had asked for.

In 1933 he was the first recipient of the T. K. Sidey Medal, funded by money raised to commemorate that Act. His obituary in the Royal Society's annals runs to about 1,700 words. Daylight saving is not mentioned in the first 1,400 of them. He is remembered there, correctly, as a man who studied insects.

Roughly a third of the world's countries still change their clocks twice a year.

Auckland sits at 175° east, on UTC+12 — shifting to UTC+13 every summer, half of what Hudson proposed, in the country where he was told it could not be done. New Zealand had been the first country in the world to officially adopt a standard national time, back in 1868, which is perhaps why it was also the first place anyone thought seriously about moving it.

And because of where it sits on the globe, Auckland is among the first cities on Earth to enter each new day.

Which makes it a fitting place for the story to end: one of the first cities to start each day belongs to a postal clerk who just wanted a bit more evening light to go and look at moths, and was told not to be ridiculous.