Did you know that Franklin was the first to propose daylight saving time, in a 1784 letter to the editors of the Journal of Paris. His suggestion was not particularly serious, however – the purpose of his article was to poke fun at Parisian high-society for staying up all night and sleeping in till past noon. Nonetheless, he calculated that Parisian families could save 96 million pre-revolutionary French pounds in candle wax and tallow from rising earlier in the summer. When Daylight Saving Time was first formally introduced, first by Germany and then by Britain and the USA, during World War I, it was for the same reasons of fuel conservation and economy first noted by Franklin.
