Benjamin Franklin
It’s that time again. Daylight Saving Time.
I don’t like it and i blame Benjamin Franklin for bringing it up in the first place, but a lot of folks think that its a good deal This morning I was ranting about it and the Goohle Info girl suggested that Ben is not at fault.
Benjamin Franklin is often mistakenly credited with inventing daylight saving time (DST), but this is not true. While Franklin did suggest the idea of adjusting sleep schedules to make better use of daylight, he didn’t propose a formal system like DST.
In 1784, during his time in Paris as the U.S. ambassador to France, Franklin wrote a satirical letter to the Journal de Paris about how Parisians could save money on candles by waking up earlier to use natural light. He humorously suggested that if people rose with the sun, they could save thousands of pounds of candle wax each year. His letter proposed whimsical solutions like firing cannons at sunrise to wake people up and installing taxes on window shutters that blocked out the sun.
Franklin’s letter was intended as a joke and more of an observation on people’s wasteful habits than a serious proposal for changing timekeeping. The modern concept of DST, where clocks are shifted forward in the spring and back in the fall, came much later.
The idea for DST as we know it was first formally proposed by British builder William Willett in 1907. He lobbied for the practice to be adopted as a way to make better use of daylight during summer months. Willett’s idea was eventually implemented during World War I as a way to conserve fuel by reducing the need for artificial lighting.
So, while Franklin’s witty suggestion about using daylight more efficiently is part of his legacy, he did not invent daylight saving time. That innovation came from others, years after his humorous proposal.
Charles Jackson
Thought provoker
