Benjamin Franklin that is!  Do you know how Daylight Savings Time Originated?  In 1784 Benjamin Franklin is thought to have come up with the idea for daylight-saving time. In a whimsical letter to a French journal, he said that Parisians could save thousands of francs a years by waking up earlier during the summer because it would prevent them from having to buy so many candles to light the evening hours.

Years later in 1905 the prominent English builder and outdoorsman William Willett invented DSTduring one of his pre-breakfast horseback rides, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through the best part of a summer day. An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk. His solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later.  In the US standard time in time zones was instituted by the railroads in 1883, but DST was not established in U.S. law until the Act of March 19, 1918, sometimes called the Standard Time Act.   These great minds were definitely thinking alike.  I too enjoy my long summer days with extended daylight.

Wikipedia reminds us of all his great accomplishments.  The most memorable perhaps during the American Revolution in 1776, he was a member of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence and made several small changes to Thomas Jefferson's draft.  He is also mentioned for social innovations, such as paying forward.  I particularly am fond of this idea and get a kick out of buying the customer's coffee in line behind me.  I personally love collecting his picture on the $100 bills that I refer to as "Benny's"!

Remember that Ben can't really take the credit for Daylight Savings Time as like ancient Rome, 18th-century Europe did not keep accurate schedules.  Rather, he is the author of the proverb, "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise". 

And being an election year you might find interesting that like the other advocates of republicanism, Franklin emphasized that the new republic could survive only if the people were virtuous in the sense of attention to civic duty and rejection of corruption. All his life he had been exploring the role of civic and personal virtue, as expressed in Poor Richard's aphorisms.