Road Apples
March 5, 2007

Inconvenient Ben and his French Connection

By Tim Sanders

It is almost time to perform that odious Springtime ritual of setting our clocks an hour ahead. We do this so that we can set them back an hour in the Fall. But how did all of this foolishness start, you ask? Well, it is Benjamin Franklin’s fault.

Ben Franklin was probably the most confounding of our founding fathers. He spent most of his life confounding 18th Century Americans with a series of nutty concepts, including the Franklin after dinner mint, the Franklin lightning rod and reel, the Franklin super sleuth X-ray bifocals, and the strange practice of swinging cats over his head during thunderstorms. If these weren’t enough to convince people he was a bit "different," then his almanac certainly did the trick.

From 1733 to 1758 Ben published "Poor Richard’s Almanac." That almanac distressed and confused Franklin’s fellow colonists. They complained that his almanac advised pruning asparagus trees in early October, planting dumpling bushes in thick, moist soil, and putting horse manure on strawberries instead of cream and sugar. Worst of all were his Poor Richard maxims, which he considered wise and witty. Here are a few:


"Get thee early to bed, and early to bed thou shalt be."

"If thine cup be half full, ‘tis doubtless the bottom half."

"There’s no fool like a cow."

"A penny saved is one-tenth of a dime."

"You can lead a horse to water, but baptizing him is a different matter altogether."

"He who holdeth his tongue soon hath wet fingers."

Dance not with that goose, Deborah!"
 

Thus, when the fledgling nation needed to send a minister to France in 1776, Franklin was the unanimous choice. "Godspeed, Ben," supporters cried as he boarded his ship, "And don’t forget thy almanacs!"

The French people, not surprisingly, found Franklin’s idiosyncrasies endearing. Mobs followed him around Paris, shrieking "Monsieur Franklin, say something witty and wise." Ben, happy to oblige, would smile and drop a couple of Poor Richard maxims on them. "Even a rich man will stink with garlic in his pants," or "You can’t teach an old dog algebra." This always delighted the French people, and they would applaud and offer him large wedges of cheese.

Franklin noticed that the residents of Paris all slept until noon. They said it was because the preponderance of scientific evidence indicated that noon was when the sun rose. When Franklin woke a couple of his French friends at 6 a.m., threw open their shutters and showed them that the sun was already clearly visible, they were amazed. In an effort to persuade the French to "save daylight" and also cut down on non-renewable sources of illumination such as candle wax and lamp oil, Franklin suggested that the French consider rising earlier.

But as much as they loved Franklin, Parisians hated the idea of rising before noon. It was against their principles. So Franklin tried another tack. He said that they could fool themselves into believing they were still rising at noon, but save themselves several hours of daylight each morning by simply setting their clocks back six hours each October. The French Royal Academy of Time Frittering studied Franklin’s daylight saving proposal for six months before rejecting it on the grounds that it would ultimately result in France losing several calendar years and falling back into the Middle Ages.

Franklin countered with a less drastic proposal in which the Parisians could set their clocks back merely an hour each Fall. Then in the Spring they could set their clocks forward again, and everything would work out just fine. Many of the French scientists felt that this was reasonable, and for the next five years they debated the issue, until the French Revolution broke out. By then Franklin was back in the United States, and the French theoreticians, distracted with the science of lobbing off heads in the most economical fashion, forgot all about Daylight Saving Time.

It was a bad idea. It was a silly idea. But like all bad, silly ideas, the notion of Daylight Saving Time would not die. By the early 20th Century, most industrialized European nations, including France and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, had adopted some form of the plan. And because Americans are always impressed by things European, our nation soon followed suit.

There is a long history of how America’s Daylight Saving plan evolved over the past century, but I will not go into that. It gives me a headache. Especially the part about the tragic miscalculation which left residents of northeastern Indiana in the dark from October of 1933 until the Spring of 1935.

Several years ago I happened upon a gentleman in Gaylesville who had devised a much more practical system of saving daylight. He placed several gallon jugs outside his home during the day, capped them just before the sun went down, and put them into a storage shed. The shed was well insulated and did not leak any light at all. He showed me that shed one evening, and in total darkness, from only a few feet away, not a sliver of light was visible. Within a few months he’d amassed over eighteen hundred gallons of Grade A, top quality daylight, and he told me he’d saved thousands of kilowatts each month by not using his incandescent bulbs. Instead, he would go to his storage shed and fetch a couple pints of daylight. He said that was enough to allow him to read the paper, or perhaps peruse his beloved National Geographic for an hour or so before bedtime. I later heard that he was blinded by an explosion. Neighbors said it happened when he poured five gallons of 200-octane, high noon daylight directly into the carburetor of his solar-powered John Deere.

To my knowledge, no one has developed the Gaylesville bottled daylight concept further. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that if the French were to get wind of it, it would soon be as popular as mimes, goat cheese, escargot and Daylight Saving Time.

And every bit as useful, too.