The Balmoral Clocktower, Edinburgh

© Puthipong Worasaran/Moment/Getty Image

Time to set your clocks right. British Summer Time ends

Time is of the essence today: the last Sunday of October marks the end of British Summer Time. At 2 AM this morning, the clocks fell back one hour, meaning there was an extra hour of sleep. While the idea of summer time was mentioned in 1784 by American inventor Benjamin Franklin, the first serious proposal for changing the clocks in the United Kingdom came from British builder William Willett in 1907. He valued having more daylight and felt so strongly about this that he published a pamphlet called 'The Waste of Daylight. Over time, many countries adopted the practice to give people more daylight in the evenings during the summer months.

The clock in today's image is of the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland. This famous clock hasn't been on time since 1902, by three minutes, to be exact. The move was made to lessen the likelihood that the people would miss their trains. However, it does align with Greenwich Mean Time once a year, on December 31.