Daylight Saving: Whose idea was it?

During the nine years he spent as American ambassador to France, American inventor and politician Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay called “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light” to the editor of The Journal of Paris in 1784. In the essay, he suggested that Parisians could reduce candle usage by getting people out of bed earlier in the morning, making use of the natural morning light instead.

 William Willett was the man who introduced the idea of British Summer Time, aka as Daylight Saving Time, in 1907. He was keen to prevent people from wasting vital hours of light during summer mornings. He published a pamphlet called 'The Waste of Daylight' in a bid to get people out of bed earlier by changing the nation’s clocks.

Willett proposed moving the clocks backwards and forwards by 80 mins, setting the clocks ahead 20 minutes on each of the four Sundays in April, and switching them back by the same amount on each of the four Sundays in September, a total of eight time switches per year. He then spent the rest of his life trying to convince people his scheme was a good one. more