zone. Neither is daylight savings of much practicality in such places as China, which—despite its width of thousands of miles—is all located within a single time zone per government mandate. History Ancient civilizations adjusted daily schedules to the sun more flexibly than DST does, often dividing daylight into 12 hours regardless of daytime, so that each daylight hour became progressively longer during spring and shorter during autumn. For example, the Romans kept time with water clocks that had different scales for different months of the year; at Rome's latitude, the third hour from sunrise (hora tertia) started at 09:02 solar time and lasted 44 minutes at the winter solstice, but at the summer solstice it started at 06:58 and lasted 75 minutes. From the 14th century onward, equal-length civil hours supplanted unequal ones, so civil time no longer varied by season. Unequal hours are still used in a few traditional settings, such as monasteries of Mount Athos and in Jewish ceremonies. Benjamin Franklin published the proverb "early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise," and published a letter in the Journal de Paris during his time as an American envoy to France (1776–1785) suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. This 1784 satire proposed taxing window shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. Despite common misconception, Franklin did not actually propose DST; 18th-century Europe did not even keep precise schedules. However, this changed as rail transport and communication networks required a standardization of time unknown in Franklin's day. In 1810, the Spanish National Assembly Cortes of Cádiz issued a regulation that moved certain meeting times forward by one hour from 1 May to 30 September in recognition of seasonal changes, but it did not change the clocks. It also acknowledged that private businesses were in the practice of changing their opening hours to suit daylight conditions, but they did so of their own volition. New Zealand entomologist George Hudson first proposed modern DST. His shift-work job gave him leisure time to collect insects and led him to value after-hours daylight. In 1895, he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch; he followed up with an 1898 paper. Many publications credit the DST proposal to prominent English