G'morning David,

 -> And incidentally,  am I wrong is thinking that the whole idea was
 -> first dreamnt up by Benjamin Franklin ?

 DW> Before you can mess with them, you have to have standard time zones, as
 DW> opposed to setting clocks to local solar time. Time zones were
 DW> introduced in the 19th Century when railways started carrying people
 DW> quickly over long distances. I think even this step was post-Franklin,
 DW> so the idea of shifting clocks to save daylight is probably even more
 DW> recent.

I found my reference - I'd dug it up for a debate on daylight 
saving some years ago....   Franklin wrote an essay entitled "An 
Economical Project" for the "Journal de Paris", published on 26 
April of 1784.

In it, he proposed to save oil in the new-fangled lamps by 
shifting all clocks to match the dawn in summertime - and offered 
a set of regulations to help the adoption of his daylight saving 
time...

That included waking all Parisians up at dawn with cannon-fire so 
as not to miss the free light...

He was then 78 - what a mind...

Miles. 
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