Did Benjamin Franklin Really Invent Daylight Saving Time?

On Sunday morning in the UK the hour between 1am and 2am will simply disappear. No witchcraft will have occurred, of course, we will simply have put the clocks forward an hour and moved onto British Summer Time (known as Daylight Saving Time – DST hereafter – in the USA and Canada) for the better part of six months. But when did we start doing this, and why? As an adjunct to my series on time I thought that this was a subject worth delving into a little more.