Shedding a Little Light on Daylight-Saving Time

On Sunday, most Americans will wake up only to realize they've lost an hour of their weekend to daylight-saving time — the price we pay for eight months of well-lit evenings.

Unless you live in Arizona or Hawaii, which don't observe daylight saving, you're probably used to this routine by now. But the history of daylight-saving time has been anything but peaceful, from its first wartime introduction to its ongoing controversy today.

Bright idea
Ben Franklin gets credit for thinking up the idea of daylight-saving time, albeit with his trademark wit. As ambassador to Paris, Franklin wrote a letter to the Journal of Paris in 1784 of his "discovery" that the sun gives light as soon as it rises, and needling Parisians for their night-owl, candle-burning ways.

"Ben Franklin had the basic concept," said David Prerau, author of "Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time" (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005). What Franklin lacked, Prerau said, was a useful way to force everyone into living by the sun's rules — other than some "humorous ideas" that Parisians surely wouldn't have found very funny, including shooting off cannons at sunrise every morning.

More