Daylight Savings can be perplexing. Why do we lose an hour or gain an hour all of a sudden? Is it in our best interest to even have Daylight Savings. The initial idea for this manipulation of time came from Ben Franklin.
It was published in the Journal de Paris in April 1784. Franklin was living out his last years in Paris at the time at the age of 78. He described how he noticed that Parisians often slept very late, wasting precious daylight hours. They then would have to spend money to light their residences with candles while they stayed up after the sun went down.
Franklin proposed a number of ideas for controlling when people went to bed, including taxing those with shutters on their windows that didn't allow the light in. Looking at this list though, it is fairly obvious that Franklin is joking. Looks like someone took his idea a little too seriously.