Ben Franklin was a prolific inventor, but he’s become even more so in the 227 years since he died, which is hard to do. Just as droll orphan aphorisms seem to attach by default to Mark Twain or Yogi Berra, orphan inventions are sometimes attributed to Franklin, especially if he ever entertained the general subject, which he almost always did in his prodigious body of satirical writing. Such is the case with daylight saving time, which takes an hour of sleep from us this weekend. Franklin is often credited – or blamed, depending on your view – for this relic of an older era, although not as old as his.

The myth is based on a satirical letter Franklin penned six years before his death to the Journal of Paris and signed “a subscriber.” In it, he recounted discovering, to his astonishment, that the sun rose and shone much earlier in the morning than was any use to him – he was a famous late-night carouser well into his 70s – and then set just as he was getting going:I considered that, if I had not been awakened so early in the morning, I should have slept six hours longer by the light of the sun, and in exchange have lived six hours the following night by candle-light; and, the latter being a much more expensive light than the former, my love of economy induced me to muster up what little arithmetic I was master of, and to make some calculations, which I shall give you, after observing that utility is, in my opinion the test of value in matters of invention, and that a discovery which can be applied to no use, or is not good for something, is good for nothing.

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