Time is weird. We treat it like a natural law, but it’s actually just a collective hallucination we’ve all agreed to follow so we don't miss our flights. If you're looking for a fun fact for today, you’ve probably heard that Benjamin Franklin invented Daylight Saving Time because he wanted to save candles.
He didn't.
Honestly, the real story is way more chaotic. It involves a bug-collecting New Zealander who was annoyed he couldn't catch moths in the dark and a massive political row that nearly broke the British Parliament.
The Franklin Myth and the Paris Prank
Most people think Franklin was being serious. In 1784, while serving as the American envoy to France, he wrote an essay titled "An Economical Project." He suggested that Parisians could save a fortune on tallow and wax if they just got out of bed earlier.
But here’s the thing: Franklin was a notorious troll.
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The essay was a satirical jab at the French for being lazy. He literally suggested firing cannons in the streets to wake people up at sunrise. He wasn't proposing a legislative shift in the clocks; he was making fun of his neighbors for sleeping past noon. Yet, for some reason, this is the fun fact for today that gets repeated in elementary schools every single year. It’s a classic case of history losing the punchline.
George Hudson: The Man Who Actually Wanted More Sun
If you want to blame someone for the twice-yearly ritual of hunting for the microwave clock manual, blame George Hudson.
Hudson was an entomologist in New Zealand in the late 1890s. He worked a shift job, which meant he had precious little daylight left after work to go out and collect insects. He valued his hobby so much that in 1895, he proposed a two-hour daylight-saving shift to the Wellington Philosophical Society.
They laughed at him.
They thought it was confusing and wholly unnecessary. But Hudson was persistent. He didn't care about "productivity" in the corporate sense; he just wanted to find more beetles. Eventually, the idea caught the ear of William Willett, a British builder who was similarly annoyed that his golf games were being cut short by dusk. Willett spent the rest of his life (and a lot of his money) lobbying the UK government to shift the clocks. He died before it ever became law, which is a bit of a bummer.
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Why We Actually Started Moving the Clocks
It wasn't about golf or bugs in the end. It was about coal.
Germany was the first country to actually adopt Daylight Saving Time in 1916. We’re talking right in the middle of World War I. They needed to conserve fuel for the war effort, and reducing the use of artificial lighting was the easiest way to do it. The UK and the US followed suit shortly after.
Once the war ended, everyone hated it.
Farmers, in particular, were livid. If you've ever tried to explain to a cow that it’s actually 6:00 AM instead of 5:00 AM, you’ll understand why. Cows don’t care about the Kaiser or fuel shortages; they want to be milked when their udders are full. This created a decades-long "time war" in the United States where cities would observe DST but the surrounding rural areas wouldn't.
The 1960s Time Chaos
Imagine driving 35 miles and having to change your watch seven times. That actually happened.
Until the Uniform Time Act of 1966, the US was a complete mess. A bus ride from Moundsville, West Virginia, to Steubenville, Ohio, was only half an hour long, but because of the local variations in time zones and DST observance, passengers theoretically went through seven different time changes.
It was a logistical nightmare for the shipping industry and the burgeoning airline business. Basically, the government had to step in because the lack of a consistent fun fact for today regarding what time it actually was was costing businesses millions in lost productivity and scheduling errors.
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Does It Actually Save Energy?
This is where the nuance kicks in. You’ll hear people argue about this until they’re blue in the face.
A famous 2008 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at Indiana. Before 2006, some Indiana counties observed DST and others didn’t. When the whole state switched over, researchers had a perfect "natural experiment."
They found that DST actually increased electricity demand.
Why? Because while people used fewer lights, they used way more air conditioning. When you come home and the sun is still beating down on your house for an extra hour, your AC unit has to work overtime to keep the place cool. The "energy saving" argument is mostly a relic of the 1910s when lighting was the primary drain on a household's resources. Today, our gadgets and climate control systems have flipped the script.
The Health Toll Nobody Talks About
We talk about losing an hour of sleep like it’s a minor inconvenience. It’s actually kind of dangerous.
Statistical data consistently shows a spike in heart attacks and traffic accidents on the Monday following the "spring forward" shift. A study published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine suggests that the disruption to our circadian rhythms is much deeper than we realize. Our internal biological clocks are tuned to "solar time"—the position of the sun in the sky—not the arbitrary numbers on our iPhones.
Moving Beyond the "Fun Fact"
So, what’s the takeaway here?
- Check your sources. If a history book tells you Franklin invented DST, it's ignoring the satire.
- Watch your heart. In the week following the spring time change, maybe go a bit easier on the caffeine and prioritize extra sleep.
- Lobby for Permanent Standard Time. Most sleep scientists, including those at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, argue that "Permanent Standard Time" (not Permanent Daylight Time) is better for human health because it aligns our social clocks with the sun.
The real fun fact for today is that we are one of the few species on Earth that thinks it can "save" time by simply changing how we measure it. It's a bit like trying to make a blanket longer by cutting a foot off the top and sewing it onto the bottom.
How to Handle the Next Time Change Like a Pro
If you want to mitigate the "social jetlag" that comes with our weird obsession with shifting hours, stop treating it like a one-day event.
- Shift in increments: Four days before the change, go to bed 15 minutes earlier (or later) each night.
- Get morning sun: Light exposure is the strongest "zeitgeber" (time-giver) for your brain. Stepping outside for 10 minutes at 8:00 AM can reset your internal clock faster than any amount of coffee.
- Audit your electronics: Ensure your "smart" devices are actually set to update automatically. You'd be surprised how many legacy thermostats and old appliances still require manual intervention, leading to "ghost hours" that mess up your schedule.
Time is a tool, not a master. But as long as we keep moving the goalposts, we might as well understand the weird, bug-obsessed, war-torn history of why we do it in the first place.