Ben Franklin proposed Daylight Saving Time – but was he joking? History of the annual time change

This Sunday, March 13, the U.S. springs forward for Daylight Saving Time. At least most of the U.S. Since states are not required to change their clocks Arizona and Hawaii have opted not to do so. Before the coming of the Uniform Time Act of 1966 different states, and even different towns and different businesses, set their own timekeeping rules, creating confusion and chaos. Amid frequent questions of why we even have to observe the twice-yearly time changes are frequent questions how the practice ever started.

Ben Franklin was the one who first proposed Daylight Saving Time after waking at 6 a.m. and finding the sun already streaming in his window, meaning he had wasted an hour of daylight. Franklin argued that if people rose with the sun and turned in earlier at night they would save “an immense sum” of money on candles.

Was he joking? No one knows for sure, but an essay that Franklin wrote in 1784 concluded that it is impossible that the Parisian people, being sensible sorts, would want to live by the “smoky, unwholesome, and enormously expensive light of candles” if they had only realized that the sun (which costs nothing) was up earlier in the morning when they could have used it.

Knowing there would be detractors to his idea, just as there are today, Franklin proposed measures to encourage the time change, including rationing candle sales, taxes on window shutters that blocked out the early morning sunlight, prohibiting non-emergency coach traffic after dark and firing cannons in every street to wake the “sluggards” up.

Michael Downing, the Tufts University professor who wrote Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, says it is “easy to say Franklin was just joking, and of course he was spoofing the French for being lazy.” However, Franklin was a thrifty guy, so the thought that he was seriously making a money-saving proposal makes sense.