Benjamin Franklin once jokingly proposed firing cannons at sunrise to wake Parisians and eliminate the need for candles.

In April 1784, while serving as American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin published an anonymous letter in the Journal de Paris titled "An Economical Project." He described being awakened at 6:00 AM by a sudden noise and being astonished to discover his room flooded with sunlight—a revelation that the sun provides light immediately upon rising. Using satirical reasoning, he calculated that 100,000 Parisian families burning candles for seven hours nightly consumed approximately 64 million pounds of wax and tallow over six months.To combat this perceived "waste," Franklin proposed a series of deliberately absurd regulations: taxing window shutters that blocked sunlight, banning non-emergency coach travel after sunset, and ringing church bells or firing cannons at sunrise to rouse the entire city. He estimated these measures would save the equivalent of $200 million in today's currency. His true purpose was to satirize French customs of late-night living and morning lethargy.Although Franklin's essay was purely satirical, the concept of shifting daily schedules to align with daylight was later proposed seriously by New Zealand entomologist George Hudson in 1895, who sought additional daylight hours after work to collect insects. William Willett subsequently championed the idea in the United Kingdom in 1907 to prevent daylight waste. Germany became the first nation to officially implement Daylight Saving Time on April 30, 1916, as a fuel conservation measure during World War I.