Posted on 03/10/2018 6:07:09 AM PST by ETL
Whether you blame it on the French, the English, the Germans or Benjamin Franklin, the scourge of daylight saving time will strike at 2 a.m. Sunday and create havoc for the hapless American worker. And it all started as a joke. The elderly Benjamin Franklin, said to enjoy a robust social life in Paris as the American envoy, after bit of an all-nighter was once unhappily woken by the morning sunlight at 6 a.m. Annoyed, as any red-blooded American would be, he penned a bit of satire.
The French, Franklin wrote, could save the modern-day equivalent of $200 million “through the economy of using sunshine instead of candles” if they moved their clocks ahead by an hour.
Naturally, politicians could not take a joke and turned farce into fact, and poor Ben’s name has been defamed ever since as the founding father of daylight saving time. Still, this pained idea was championed by an Englishman named William Willett, an earnest man and obviously the kind of offensively cheerful person who can make anyone’s morning a nightmare.
Willet wrote a brochure titled “The Waste of Daylight” in 1907. He preached the gospel of “summer time,” proving once again that the American colonists were wise to fight a war to distance ourselves from tyranny.
But it wasn’t until World War I that the Germans actually implemented the idea, and it crossed the ocean to the U.S. in 1918. Now, 100 years later, perhaps it’s time to send it back.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
We may get in Florida. Serious talk for the first time. Ben Franklin needs better jokes if he doesn’t want his dumb sense of humor taken seriously. No pity for him. He started the mess regardless if he was kidding or not.
Man made Day Light Savings Time. God made Standard Time. Who are you going to go with?
That’s about the silliest thing I ever read. All clocks are manmade.
Totally agree. It should be abolished.
No. It was the railroads. He probably made high-noon time though.
Canada’s Sir Sandford Fleming played a crucial role in developing a global system for setting time. He apparently became an advocate of time zones after spending an uncomfortable night in a railway station because of time confusion. Fleming, who came to Canada from Scotland in 1845, was Canada’s foremost railway surveyor and construction engineer of the 19th-century.
Fleming instigated the initial efforts that led to the adoption of the time zones used by the railways in 1883 and the global time zones we use today. Fleming advocated dividing the world into 24 time zones, each equal to 15o of longitude and to one hour, beginning at the Greenwich Meridian (0o longitude). He was instrumental in convening the International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington in 1884. Representatives of 25 nations from Europe, North and South America and Asia attended; all adopted Fleming’s system of international standard time. Fleming did not invent standardized time, but he is the father of international standard time.
Why? Why do we foot at all? Pick one. I don’t care which on, and leave it alone.
Doing something, anything, this disruptive without a good and we’ll known reason is collectively stupid. I’m not playing along this year. I’m retired and don’t need to make the change save for the occasional appointment and I can manage that just fine. The rest of you can continue to deal with this siliness.
Let s go back to setting all times locally to when the sun is at its midpoint.
Wrong! simplifying time zones is a communist idea! Red China uses one time for its entire nation.
In free nations like the US, states can choose to go on DST or not to. Arizona and Hawaii have chosen not to. States rights rule!
I. HATE. IT.
The states have no real rights on this. Sure a couple opt not to DST, but when the fed changed when DST starts and ends they all stay in line. When Carter wanted it to go 2 hours everybody stayed in line. Just because China is MORE controlling with the clock doesn’t change the simple fact that your clocks are going to read the wrong time for the next 6 months because the government told you to lie to yourself.
Me too!
How else would we remember to change the batteries in out smoke detectors?
My cat can’t wait to eat an hour early.
Me too. I like it to be still daylight when I get home from work.
Especially here in Alaska, I despise this retardation. In the spring, it screws us out of daylight in the morning, and in the fall, it screws us out of daylight in the evening. It sucks, it’s stupid, it doesn’t make any sense. No one can honestly defend it for any logical reason.
Daylight Losing Time is just another way to manipulate all of us in a fundamental way. Thanks ETL.
If you don’t say something silly sometimes you’ll may not get a response.
Thanks for your reply. I am no longer ignorant about the time of day.
Thanks for your reply, I had a feeling I was technically wrong. LOL
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