Blame it on Ben Franklin

As we all know, I loathe Daylight Savings Time, but who knew I had Ben to blame!

Ben Franklin couldn’t abide wastefulness. So, as an American envoy in Paris, he thought nothing of firing off a crotchety letter to a French newspaper complaining of Parisians who daily squandered daylight.

Les Parisiens, he complained, stayed up late into the night and awoke at noon, wasting 96 million pounds of wax and tallow each year.

Franklin’s solution wasn’t to spring clocks forward and back, as is the modern c