The idea of summer time or daylight saving time was first floated in 1784 by Benjamin Franklin, the American inventor, scientist and statesman. He passed house after house with closed blinds, and it suddenly came to him that the morning sunlight was going to waste. The in 1905, British builder William Willett was riding his horse through the London suburbs. In summertime, the change allows people to shift an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening to reduce energy consumption. When and why was daylight saving time introduced?Ĭlocks are moved back and forward to make better use of natural daylight in the morning. There seems to be little appetite for such a change in the current political and economic climate, and given the various unresolved issue of how it would work it will take years before the European Commission’s proposal comes into effect. Moreover, since then Europe had to deal with Brexit, the Covid pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine, which has pushed energy and food prices to new highs, hitting European consumers and businesses hard and threatening to push the bloc’s economy into recession. The proposal was then rubber-stamped by the European Parliament a year later, but the change has never been approved by the European Council, with the small detail of whether Europe should permanently remain on summertime or wintertime still unresolved. However, not all countries overwhelmingly supported the idea, with less than half of participants in Cyprus, Greece and Malta agreeing to such a move. In 2018, the European Commission unveiled its proposal to abolish the time change following a public consultation in which an overwhelming majority of the 4.6 million European citizens who took part called for the practice to be brought to an end. But this never materialised and it seems that seasonal time changes are here to stay, at least for now. However, a few years back the European Parliament voted to end the practice of adjusting clocks by an hour in spring and autumn as from 2021. ![]() The daylight saving time typically runs between the last Sunday of March and the last Sunday of October. Officially wintertime in Malta ends at 2am on Sunday 26 March. Malta and the rest of Europe will on Sunday have to spring their clocks forward by an hour as millions of citizens welcome Summertime.
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