By Yvonne Nachtigal
Having advanced our clocks an hour on Sunday, most of us are a bit groggier and crankier than normal this week. The question arises, “why on earth do we do this?”
Benjamin Franklin is popularly credited with daylight saving time (DST), but that is a myth. What Franklin did was note that Parisians, who, he maintained, wasted half their day sleeping, would save money on candles and better utilize daylight by going “early to bed and early to rise.”
Our elementary school teachers told us that the idea of “maximizing daylight” was to help farmers and lower the nation’s electricity usage. But, historically, farmers and the agricultural industry have been the only ones who have lobbied against the plan because it left them with less sunlight to get their crops to market.