It’s the end of daylight saving time this weekend. But why do we “spring forward,” or, as is the case on Sunday morning, “fall back”?
New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson, whose work collecting insects would benefit from after-hours daylight, first proposed the time shift in 1895.
The practice didn’t catch on until 1916, however, when Germany and its World War I allies used daylight saving time to conserve coal to help the war effort. England and Russia followed suit shortly thereafter, and the United States finally adopted daylight saving time in 1918.
