The idea behind Daylight Savings Time was not exclusive to the United States. Rather, it was an idea that was batted around for the better part of a century in many countries, with none of them taking the initiative to develop a program to make the most of daylight. In New Zealand, for example, a member of the Philosophical Society put forward just such an idea in the closing years of the 19th century. In Britain, and avid horse rider William Willett noticed that most of England would still be sleeping long after he took off on his daylight trot. Willett published A Waste of Daylight, his pamphlet polemic against sleeping well into the daylight.

On this day, May 17, in 1916, after a nearly decade-long resistance to Willett’s proposal, Britain finally relented and passed the Summer Time Act, moving clocks ahead for the summer season. Their decision was influenced less by Willett, however, and more by Germany, who started on a daylight savings program of its own to save valuable fuel for the war effort.

A large public information effort went out with the enactment of BST, with posters and announcements in major news publications explaining the change. The expiration of BST required an even larger effort, as most clocks and watches were not built to move backward. The poster announcing the resumption of normal time warned readers in small print at the bottom “the hands of ordinary STRIKING clocks should not be moved backward. The change of time should be made by moving the hands forward eleven hours and allowing the clock to strike fully at each hour.”