Every year, some countries move their clocks forward in the spring, only to move them back in the autumn.

To the vast majority of the world who doesn't participate in this odd clock fiddling, it seems a baffling thing to do.

So what's the reason behind it?

The original idea, proposed by George Hudson, was to give people more sunlight in the summer.

Of course, it's important to note that changing a clock doesn't actually make more sunlight. That's not how physics works. But by moving the clocks forward an hour, compared

to all other human activity, the sun will seem to both rise and set later. The time when the

clocks are moved forward is called daylight saving time and the rest of the year is called

standard time. This switch effectively gives people more time to enjoy the sunshine and

nice summer weather after work. Hudson, in particular, wanted more sunlight so he could

spend more time adding to his insect collection. When winter is coming, the clocks move

back, presumably because people don't want to go outside anymore. But winter doesn't

have this effect on everyone. If you live in a tropical place like Hawaii, you really

don't have to worry about seasons because they pretty much don't happen. Every day, all year, is sunny and beautiful, so Christmas is just as good of a day to hit the beach as any other. And so, Hawaii is one of two states in the Union that ignore daylight saving time. But the further you travel from the equator in either direction, the more the seasons assert themselves,

and you get colder and darker winters, making summertime much more valuable to the locals.

So it's no surprise that the further a country is from the equator, the more likely it uses daylight saving time.

Hudson proposed his idea in Wellington in 1895, but it wasn't well received, and it took until 1916 for Germany to be the first country to put it into practice.

Though the Uber-industrious Germans were less concerned with catching butterflies on a fine summer evening than they were with saving coal to feed the war machine.

The Germans thought daylight saving time would conserve energy. The reasoning goes that it encourages people to stay out later in the summer and thus use less artificial lighting.

This sounds logical and it may have worked in the more regimented society of 100 years ago,

but does it still work in the modern world?

That turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

For example, take mankind's greatest invention, air conditioning,

...