THE year was 1784; the setting Paris, and Benjamin Franklin, then the US ambassador to France, came to re-assess the country's wasteful use of light. "An accidental sudden noise waked me about six in the morning," he wrote in a letter to the Journal de Paris, "when I was surprised to find my room filled with light.

"I imagined at first that a number of lamps had been brought into the room; but rubbing my eyes I perceived the light came in at the windows. Still thinking it something extraordinary that the sun should rise so early I looked into the almanac, where I found it to be the hour given for the sun's rising on that day. (Those) who with me have never seen any sign of sunshine before noon will be as much astonished as I was when they hear of its rising so early."

While this may seem a rather obvious thing to note, in Franklin's day it was quite common to sleep late - and thereby miss the morning light. A frugal man, his instant thought was of saving candles later on, and so he came up with a plan to try to do this.

"He had some whimsical ideas," says Dr David Prerau, author of Saving the Daylight, Why We Put the Clocks Forward. "He suggested a tax on shutters and he suggested that every morning a cannon should fire in every square in Paris to wake people up."

Perhaps predictably, Franklin never got his way, yet his idea - of making better use of light - did not entirely disappear. As Dr Prerau explains, it was in England, more than 100 years on, that it resurfaced. "Fast forward to 1905 and (the leading businessman) William Willett used to get up early each morning and go for a horseback ride," he says. "He was riding around and he would see that almost nobody else was up - they were wasting this beautiful part of the day. He also realised that at the other end of the day, when people got home from work, there wasn't enough daylight left for them to go outside and do things like gardening or sports, and this whole situation bothered him.

"One day, while he was riding, he had the idea that if we could move the clocks forward then everybody could get up and do their activities but they would actually be doing them closer to sunrise."

Willett's premise - of changing time to meet our needs instead of living by the clock - gave rise to daylight saving time, on which US-based Dr Prerau is an expert.

He tells me how this came to be. "I was working for the US government as a researcher and got involved in what turned out to be the largest study ever made on the effects of daylight saving time - how it affected things like accidents, injuries and crime," he says. "While I was doing that I got curious about the history of daylight saving time and found that nobody knew much about it, so I started researching and realised it has an interesting history."

As Dr Prerau says, while it seemed logical and now exists in many countries, including Britain and the US, it took some years to reach the statute books. "Willett proposed what we call daylight saving time or summertime in a pamphlet he wrote in 1907, and in 1908 a bill was proposed in the British Parliament. However, though many people favoured it, it was rejected. It would have been revolutionary. Only some 20 years earlier, standard time zones had been put in around the world and now someone was trying to de-standardise it. Many scientists were against it for that reason and farmers didn't like it as they have to follow the sun, regardless of the clock."

Yet Willetts was undaunted and, through a series of MPs, ensured the bill was not allowed to fade away. It helped that many who had clout were fans of daylight saving time. "He had some pretty major supporters," says Dr Prerau. "One of those was Winston Churchill and there was a major rally in favour of daylight saving time in 1911, in the Guildhall in London. Churchill was the main speaker."

When Willetts died in 1915, it seemed the cause was truly lost - but in the midst of the First World War there was a sudden twist of fate.

'One year later, in 1916, the countries in the First World War realised it was important to save energy for the wartime effort, which is what Benjamin Franklin had realised,"says Dr Prerau. "The Germans, having heard of William Willett's idea, were the first to put in daylight saving time. Two weeks later, Britain finally acted - having rejected it for all those years, Parliament passed a law to establish summertime."

Many countries in the war took similar steps, but with the restoration of peace, most scrapped their daylight saving schemes. Britain kept its summertime but as the concept has evolved, it's seen a large degree of change.

"In 1968, Britain tried having year-round summertime, called British Standard Time on a three-year trial period," says Dr Prerau. "Most people favoured it but because of the weight of opposition, when the trial period ended Parliament voted not to extend it and to go back to summertime only in the summer. That's been the system ever since."

It seems that daylight saving time has always prompted fierce debate, with farmers leading those who feel it should be scrapped.

Yet Dr Prerau feels the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages. "Most people prefer the extra hour of daylight in the evening, so generally summertime is popular around the world," he says. "There are people who would prefer that extra hour of light in the morning and in addition, there are people who worry about things like their children going to school on dark mornings, but most studies show that daylight saving time prevents accidents and traffic fatalities because there's more traffic in the afternoon and evening than in the morning. Also people are fresher and haven't had alcoholic drinks in the morning.

"Most studies show energy benefits and that's the main reason daylight saving time is used. There's also data that it probably reduces some crime because there's not much outdoor crime before sunrise but a lot after sunset. So an extra hour of light in the evening tends to reduce crime."

In Britain today, as in all of Europe, the date for summertime to start is set at the last Sunday in March, with clocks going back on the final Sunday in October.

Dr Prerau says this may not last for long. "Starting next year there's going to be a major change in US daylight saving time - it's going to expand for about a month," he says. "There's going to be a much larger time period where there's a difference between North America and Europe, which will certainly cause some confusion because people will expect there to be a standard time difference between the US and the UK - five hours - and it's not going to be that way for about three or four weeks a year.

"There's also a bill in the British Parliament called the Lighter Evenings Bill, proposing a similar system to that which was in the UK during the Second World War, which is single summertime in winter and double summertime in summer, and that would essentially put the UK on central European time."

However much the world has changed, the basic concept of saving light as first set out by Benjamin Franklin remains the same. As Dr Prerau succinctly puts it: "Even though daylight saving time doesn't actually add any light it puts the light in a place in the day that's generally more convenient for people."

* Saving the Daylight, Why We Put the Clocks Forward by David Prerau (Granta Books, £8.99)