George Vernon Hudson, a New Zealand entomologist and astronomer, was the first to put forward the idea to move the hands of the clock to make full use of daylight hours. In his free time from the main work, he devoted to collecting a collection of insects. In 1895, Hudson presented a paper to the Wellington Philological Society, which proposed a two-hour daylight savings time shift.
Summer time
Hudson's idea sparked some interest in his home country of New Zealand. But over time, I forgot. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British developer William Willett independently thought about the transition to daylight saving time. In 1907, at his own expense, he published a brochure "On the waste of daylight."
In it, Willett suggested moving the clock forward 80 minutes in four steps during April. And in September, do everything in reverse order. In his opinion, bright evenings will become longer, the time for summer holidays will increase, and there will also be an opportunity to save significant funds on lighting.
After a vigorous campaign, by 1908 Willett had secured the backing of MP Robert Pearce, who made several unsuccessful attempts to get the law through the House of Commons. For some time young Winston Churchill helped him in this.
The issue gained importance in the year of the First World War, primarily due to the need to preserve coal. On April 30, 1916, the transition to daylight saving time was carried out by the German Empire and Austria-Hungary. Many other countries soon followed suit.
After the end of the First World War, daylight saving time was canceled. In most countries, it has not been used for a long time. Daylight saving time again became widespread, in particular in the United States of America and in Europe, in the seventies, when the energy crisis erupted.
Winter time
If the transition to daylight saving time is a widespread practice, then the use of winter time, in the sense of translating the clock hands back from standard time in the winter months, is very rare. Such cases are rare in history.
So, winter time was introduced by a government decree in Czechoslovakia from December 1, 1946 to February 23, 1947. The main reason was the fact that the country's power plants generated electricity 10 percent less than the potential demand. This step was intended to distribute the load on the network during peak hours.
The legislative act, which gave the government of Czechoslovakia the right to introduce winter time at any time, has not yet been canceled. This theoretically enables the governments of both the Czech Republic and Slovakia to reintroduce winter time whenever they please. However, the experiment was no longer repeated.
In fact, Russia lived in winter time in the early nineties. On March 31, 1991, the so-called "daylight saving" time introduced in 1930 was canceled. The hands of the clock have been moved back. And on September 29, the clock was set back again. Due to the dissatisfaction of citizens and excessive consumption of electricity, the "maternity" time was restored on January 19, 1992.
