Daylight saving time: Don’t Blame Ben Franklin -- But make it stop

FoxNews.com ^ | Mar 9, 2018 | Kristi Stone Hamrick

[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.

[Libloather]

The extra hour of sunlight burns my grass.

[Starstruck]

In some countries people worry about starving to death.

[Hugin]

I like it.

[ETL]

The extra hour of sunlight burns my grass.

I remember a few months ago at the winter solstice mentioning to a not-too-bright friend of mine that the days will be getting longer from that point on. He actually thought that I meant the days will extend beyond 24 hours.

[TruthFactor]

I like it too!