He was also the buttmunch that gave us daylight savings time.
Full disclosure: I am not a fan of DST, but I do not expect the current situation to change. In Europe, almost(?) all countries use it, so if just Germany (where I live) abolished DST, we would be out of sync with the rest of Europe for half of the year. Dealing with dates and times as a programmer is already confusing enough; if DST was to go, all countries would have to drop it simultaneously, or else the resulting patchwork would be too much of a pain. And I do not see that happening anytime soon.
In areas that are arguably Europe, it looks like Iceland, Kaliningrad Oblast, and Belarus are the places that stick out.
I'm in California; most of Arizona is permanently in daylight savings, and we work with a lot of developers in China and India, which don't observe it. It certainly complicates things, sometimes.
I've done work on my product's logging subsystem before, and especially bugs with recorded times. Dealing with different DST rules is a mess.
There are already countless exceptions to DST and people seem to be doing fine. E.g. in Australia there are two regions in the same time zone where only one has DST, meaning they are out of sync for half the year.
For some extra fun, the Navajo Nation observes DST, and they're _inside_ Arizona.
It is possible that DST would have happened without Franklin, but I blame him anyway, because I never liked his sanctimonious attitude toward waking up early.
For example, there was a period of history where it was much safer to drink beer all day instead of water. Without context, that sounds like a really bad idea.
Those things actually are related. Franklin proposed that Parisians could save on candle wax by getting out of bed earlier, as a joke. Nobody actually changed a clock until WW1 when Germany did it to save lamp oil.
Franklin likely promoted the lark lifestyle only because he was one, rather than from any real evidence of objective superiority. He participated in a business group that looked at successful businesses with an aim to emulate their practices. It is possible that his advice to work early was just cargo culting, in following with a long line of sanctimonious lark philosophers that painted their owl counterparts as slothful or lazy.
Standard business hours favor being a lark because those are lark hours! And then they have the nerve to be all chipper and cheerful every morning, at a time when every decent owl would prefer to be getting one last REM cycle in. How do you think they'd like it if we made them stay up past midnight every day?
