Step 1: Expand daylight savings time. Step 2: Find that flux capacitor. (AP/Stephan Savoia)

It’s too bad for the last Republican Congress that election day wasn’t held yesterday, or they might have won.

They could have trumpeted one of their biggest accomplishments of the term: extending daylight savings time!

Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) introduced a bill, which was signed by President Bush in 2005, to expand the ever-popular (as long as you’re not a farmer) daylight savings time, moving its start date up by a month and end date back by about a week.

Now that’s action. What’s the Penn connection you ask? Well, it just so happens that our dear founder, Benny Franklin, was the first to propose the better use of daylight, way back in the roaring 1780s.

As Franklin wrote in his autobiography about his visit to London,

For in walking thro’ the Strand and Fleet Street one morning at seven o clock, I observed there was not one shop open tho it had been daylight and the sun up above three hours — the inhabitants of London choosing voluntarily to live much by candlelight and sleep by sunshine, and yet often complaining a little absurdly of the duty on candles and the high price of tallow.

His idea was later translated, in the 20th century, into the modern idea of moving the clock forward by an hour in the summer.

Franklin realized, centuries ago, that people value that extra hour of daylight much more at the end of the day than at the beginning. Parents and kids can play catch after work, outdoor family dinners become a possibility (family dinners in the dark = awkward) and–as was the reasoning for the bill–people use less energy before dark.

With great ideas like this (even if they’re 200 years old), it’s amazing the Republicans lost power. As Benny said, “Time is an herb that cures all diseases.” And that time is much better at the end of a day than the beginning.

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