G. V. (George Vernon) Hudson

Born in London in 1867, he moved to New Zealand as a teenager and developed an intense early fascination with insects. That passion shaped a lifetime of work in Wellington, where he became one of the country’s best-known naturalists and built an extraordinary insect collection with help from his family.

Alongside his scientific work, he is widely remembered for proposing modern daylight saving time in 1895. The idea grew from his wish for more evening daylight to study insects after work, and it later became one of his most famous contributions.

He also wrote and illustrated important books on New Zealand insects and earned major recognition for his research, including election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Museums in New Zealand still hold large parts of his collection, a reminder of how much patient fieldwork and close observation can preserve for future readers and scientists.