Dr. Rebecca Struthers

The earliest watches actually only had an hour hand on them.

One philosophers have later theorised that the time, more accurately to an hour a day, just wasn't as important to us back then.

Daylight Saving Time, as we know it today, is often credited to William Willett, who published a paper called The Waste of Daylight in 1907.

William didn't live to see the introduction of Daylight Saving Time.

That was first introduced during the First World War.

But it was around the idea that we could save energy.

So for efficiency, we could create more daylight in the evenings.

And by the Second World War, it allowed people to get home before the blackout would kick in.

This idea of having to be at work at a certain hour or you risk getting sacked.

It is such a recent development for humans as a society.

It is very much a product of the Industrial Revolution.

And before that, we did live a much more natural relationship with time.

We would work more hours in the summer when we had more daylight and less hours in the winter.

This shift to regulating ourselves in such a strict way is so recent that we just haven't evolved to catch up.

Time is such a social and cultural thing.

It's evolved with us over thousands and thousands of years.

The 365-day year was first discovered by the ancient Egyptians, who also invented the sundial 3,500 years ago.

So that was the point we first started to break up the day.

Clock time actually gave us what we think of as our day-to-day in terms of hours of uniform length.

Before that, we used to have the same 24 hours in a day, but 12 of those would be daytime and 12 of them would be nighttime.