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Berlin Moved the Clock, and Within Six Weeks Half the World Copied It

Germany cooks somewhere between 550 and 600 tonnes of döner meat every single day.

The industry turns over roughly €2.5 to €3.5 billion a year and employs around 60,000 people. There are about 16,000 döner outlets in Germany, of which Berlin alone has somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 — more than any other city, which is appropriate, because the thing was invented here.

Not the meat. The vertical spit is Ottoman; the technique goes back to the nineteenth century, when a cook in Kastamonu reportedly turned the traditional horizontal spit upright. What was invented in Berlin was putting it in bread and handing it to someone in a hurry.

The usual account credits Kadir Nurman, born in Istanbul around 1933, who moved to Stuttgart in 1960 as a Gastarbeiter and to West Berlin in 1966. He noticed that German workers had almost no time to sit down and eat. In 1972 he set up a stall opposite Bahnhof Zoo selling kebab meat in flatbread with onion and a little lettuce — no sauce.

He never patented it.

He also never quite claimed it. Asked about being the inventor, he said in German that perhaps someone else had done it too, in some hidden corner, but nobody noticed — the kebab became well known through him. Others do claim it: Mehmet Aygün says 1971, on Oranienstraße; Nevzat Salim says 1969, in Reutlingen. The Association of Turkish Döner Manufacturers in Europe gave Nurman a lifetime achievement award in 2011. He died in Berlin in 2013.

Today the döner is sold in Vietnam as typical German student food.

The clock: Berlin has previous form for this.

On 30 April 1916, to save coal in wartime, Germany and Austria became the first countries in the world to put their clocks forward for the summer. Within about six weeks a dozen countries had copied the order — including several that were at war with Germany at the time.

The idea itself was not German. It had been proposed in Wellington in 1895 by an entomologist who was laughed at, and in London in 1907 by a builder who died before it was adopted. Germany simply implemented it, and the world took it and stopped asking where it came from.

A city that has now twice produced something the whole world adopted, and twice failed to keep its name on it.

On 6 April 1916 the German Federal Council passed an order. At eleven o'clock at night on 30 April 1916, clocks across the German Empire went forward by one hour, and stayed forward until October.

The reasoning was coal. Europe was at war, and an extra hour of evening daylight meant an hour less of artificial lighting, which meant less coal burned in homes and more available for the war effort. This was the world's first nationwide daylight saving time.

What happened next is the part worth sitting with.

Austria-Hungary followed immediately. Britain adopted it three weeks later, on 21 May 1916. France followed on 14 June. Then Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey, Tasmania, Nova Scotia and Manitoba.

Within roughly six weeks, a dozen countries — including several that were actively at war with Germany, and several trying very hard to stay out of it — had copied a German administrative order about what time it was.

The bitter detail belongs to Britain. A builder named William Willett had been campaigning for exactly this since 1907, when he published a pamphlet called The Waste of Daylight. Parliament refused him for nine years. He died in 1915. The following year Britain adopted his idea — three weeks after the enemy did it first.

The clock: every clock change on Earth descends from that 1916 coal order. Roughly a third of the world's countries still do it twice a year, moving hundreds of millions of people's schedules by one hour, twice, every year, forever.

Germany itself dropped it in 1919. The United States adopted it in 1918 and repealed it in 1919, largely because farmers hated it — their cows were on solar time and had not been consulted.

And the argument has never actually been settled. Türkiye stopped changing its clocks in 2016. Brazil in 2019. Mexico in 2022. The European Union voted to abolish the practice and then failed, for years, to agree on what to replace it with — so Berlin, which started all of this, still puts its clocks forward every March.

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