Many sources credit Benjamin Franklin with being the first to suggest seasonal time change. However, Franklin’s idea, voiced in 1784, can hardly be described as fundamental for the development of modern Daylight Saving Time. After all, it did not even involve turning the clocks back. In a letter to the editor of the Journal of Paris, which was entitled An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light, Franklin simply suggested that Parisians could economize candle usage by getting people out of bed earlier in the morning.
What's more, Franklin meant it as a joke.
from: timeanddate.com
What's more, Franklin meant it as a joke.
from: timeanddate.com
November 5, 2017
And the command went out:
AT 2:00 FALL BACK
whereupon the people obeyed,
by golly.
Easterners who dwelt in concrete towers,
flat-landers hunkered down midst corn and wheat,
settlers of snow-topped mountains
and bronze denizens of the beach.
Each donned PJs,
reprogrammed coffeemakers,
clock-radios,
microwaves, DVRs,
moved hands
on pocket watches,
on wooden Cuckoos shlepped back from the Black Forest,
then hit the sack and snoozed while
smartphones, iPads, laptops,
on their own,
altered time through networks of inscrutable cognition,
deaf to the celestial guffaw.
*
At sunrise, roosters crowed,
muezzins called,
infants wailed for mother’s breast
and all the sleeping people,
yanked too soon into the dawn,
yawned and groused, Foiled again.
*
Tinker with the hours though we might,
the God of day and night
still rolls back light before the darkness,
makes the evening fall,
makes seasons change,
causes times to come and go,
orders the stars on their appointed paths
through heaven.
And to think, come spring,
we’ll fiddle with the cosmos yet again.
I mean, really, guys.
Are we chutzpadik,
or what?