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FrogManSometimesLooksBothWays @
IronHamsterWell, I hate to disappoint you guys but the time has finally come for some American truth which I'm sure neither of your are use to hearing very often in your American culture as we know it to exist.
Allow me to set the record straight ..and listen-up Ironnuts because you are the one who perpetuated this American lie about Ben Franklin and DST:
First of all, Daylight Saving Time (DST) is one thing that Ben Franklin DID NOT invent. He merely suggested Parisians change their sleep schedules to save money on candles and lamp oil.
The common misconception of Franklin being the inventor of DST comes from a satirical essay he wrote in the spring of 1784 that was published in the Journal de Paris.
In the essay, titled "An Economical Project", Franklin writes of the thrifty benefits of daylight versus artificial light. He describes how when woken by a noise at 6am, that the sun had already risen which apparently nobody else in the world had noticed before, probably because nobody but an American intellect would be capable of noticing this perplexing phenomenon.
His conclusions? Getting out of bed with the sun would save the citizens of Paris a great deal of money: That the city of Paris might save every year by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles. He merely suggest that everyone get their butts out of bed earlier to take advantage of the early rising of the sun. That's all that Franklin had to say about it.
So, who actually first proposed DST? It was actually a New Zealand Entomologist, George Hudson, who wanted more daylight in the evenings and presented his idea about implementing DST to government officials in 1895, but who rejected his idea of artificially creating more daylight in the evenings because they thought it was a very dumb idea, which it is.
The very FIRST time DST was officially implemented anywhere in the world however, was actually in Canada in 1908 in the Canadian city of Port Arthur, Ontario which is now known as Thunder Bay, Ontario... which is at the very top of Lake Superior in the Great Lakes Region of Canada.
The very first international implementation of DST occurred in Germany following Canada's lead which occurred 8 years later in 1916 for the purpose of conserving coal during WWI.
It wasn't until 2 years after Europe and 10 years after Canada had adopted DST that Daylight Savings Time was finally adopted in the United States in 1918, for the benefit of increasing agricultural production schedules by enabling farmers to work later into the evening while still in daylight conditions since farm work horses were not equipped with headlights but thankfully they are today.
And by the way, the United States has never put a man on the moon either, so you can throw that story in the fire along with the one about Ben Franklin inventing DST.
