With the recent turning back of the clocks by one hour on Nov. 4, most people in the U.S. received one more hour of sleep because of Daylight Saving Time. That’s something that’s hard for people to complain about, because getting one more hour of sleep is always a good thing, especially for students who are rapidly approaching major assignments before finals week wreaks havoc on the student body.

However, a lot of people don’t know the root of where daylight time originated and why.

The time change was proposed by Benjamin Franklin in a 1784 satirical letter to the editor in the Journal de Paris. There, he suggested, “Parisians could save money on candles by waking up before their normal time of noon.”

There is some controversy over who gets Daylight Saving Time credit — either Englishman William Willet, who campaigned for the time in 1908 or the New Zealand entomologist who proposed the time in an 1895 paper. Regardless of who actually did it, Daylight Saving Time was introduced as a means to make better use of daylight and save energy.

Now, some might say daylight time is a waste of time and a headache with always having to turn clocks back or forward twice a year, gaining or losing an hour of sleep.

However, the benefits are rather amazing. The time change’s main goal is to save electrical energy, and 0.5 percent of total electricity per day was saved in 2008, according to Energy Department experts. That may not sound like a lot, but in reality, the amount of electricity used by more than 100,000 households was saved.

To save that much on electricity will not only be kinder to your bank account, it stimulates the economy, according to National Geographic. Daylight Saving Time really did that. What more could you ask for?