Time Lord

by Clark Blaise

  By calling the different sectional times by easily remembered names, beginning with Newfoundland, and calling the time used over Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia Eastern time, we should then have Eastern, Atlantic, Valley, Mountain, and Pacific time,—this last comprising the Pacific slope, British Columbia, and Vancouver’s Island.

  Buried beneath those very reasonable sentiments was another reality: Boston, no longer the pacesetter of American opinion, could retain its influence only in consort with other East Coast cities. The dynamism of the country lay in newer cities to the south and west, where railroads could fan out in every direction, serving their markets and importing their needs. The old seaports were constricted. “The adoption of such a standard [i.e., a single “Atlantic” time, which we now call Eastern] would free the matter from any objection based upon pride in keeping to a more local time, and would enable the cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore to have a common time for all business purposes.” It was time for the old America to consolidate its strengths and overcome its narcissistic differences.

  Gradually, even without industry innovation, the varieties of local times began to coalesce out of sheer economic necessity around the larger trading centers. Connecticut abandoned Boston time (and its pretense to a New England identity) in favor of New York City time across the entire state. A time-defined “Chicagoland” began to emerge in the tristate area around that metropolitan center. The number of official times declined to a hundred, then eighty, and finally, to forty-four, where the momentum stalled. Pressure was building, but no further progress, at least in public, was being made.

  By 1880, England had been on standard time for over thirty years. Why couldn’t Americans simply drop their local attachments and adopt a single standard? A number of theorists recommended endorsing God’s handiwork and splitting the continent right along the Mississippi valley, into two time zones. Time reform in Britain had also started with the railways, when the Great Western unilaterally dropped all local times from its schedule, unifying its routes to the time signal of the Greenwich Observatory. Other lines had been forced to follow suit, and in 1852 Greenwich was recognized as the Parliamentary standard. Britain enjoyed the benefits of standardization before any other industrialized nation, and the results—technologically, commercially, even culturally—were astounding. So why not America? For America, it was a question of scale.

  Europe was scarcely the test for standard time. To Americans, England seemed a cramped and narrow place: from easternmost East Anglia to westernmost Cornwall, the solar difference was about equal to that between the American cities of Boston and Pittsburgh. The east-west span of the entire British Isles, in fact, from East Anglia all the way to the western shore of Ireland, does not match the distance between New York and Chicago. When hours, rather than minutes, separate the population centers, practical as well as political considerations override the simple expedient of an act of Parliament.

  Considering the impossibility of reaching universal consensus today on nearly any scientific or political protocol—whether it’s rain-forest preservation, global warming, population control, landmine removal, genetic engineering, or nuclear testing—the fact that implementing standard time for the world was finally agreed to in civilized debate, did not cost a penny, nor the loss of a single life, speaks to a spirit of cooperation, and a quality of leadership, that we may never see again.

  STANDARD TIME for the world began in the creative use of a technical misadventure, and it took another turn, not necessarily for the better, two years later, when Fleming was invited to deliver his second, simplified, time paper to the 1878 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Dublin. His paper had caused a mild sensation at the Canadian Institute on its first reading, causing the governor-general of Canada, the Marquess of Lorne (Queen Victoria’s dandyish son-in-law), to forward copies to Sir George Airy, the astronomer-royal, and to the Colonial Office in London for purposes of having it translated and sent to the world’s leading astronomers. Airy relayed his recommendations directly to the Privy Council. Fleming’s paper would not, however, enjoy a sympathetic hearing at the Dublin meeting. It would receive no hearing at all.

  It’s never easy, coming from the colonies, to storm the imperial center, lacking the proper degrees and credentials, but one should not have to suffer additional insults on their behalf, as Airy’s recommendation would soon impose. It was the beginning of the bleakest year and a half of Fleming’s life. The indecisive-ness of his engineering commission and attacks from his parliamentary enemies combined, within months, to force his dismissal from the Canadian Pacific. One can feel enormous sympathy for Fleming’s earnestness, his belief in the British system, and for the multifarious vanities of the Victorian public thinker. He was not a vindictive man, but in a very long life he never forgot, nor forgave, the wounding he took in those two weeks in Dublin, waiting to deliver his paper. For the remaining thirty-five years of his life, he would be, essentially, honored but unemployed.

  He wrote to the secretary of the conference from his Dublin hotel room, on the last day of the session:

  I reside in Canada and can only enjoy the advantages of the association by travelling a long distance at considerable inconvenience. I determined to be present at Dublin. I prepared a paper which I thought clearly came within the objects of the association as set forth. I complied strictly with the rules as laid down under the heading notice to contributors. I received a proper acknowledgement before the end of July and was then informed that my paper be brought before Section A.

  I arrived in Dublin on the 14th inst. bringing with me instruments and drawings prepared at considerable trouble and expense and addressed a note to the secretary of Section A and informed him I was ready to read my paper whenever convenient. On the morning of the 15th I called and was told that I would be informed in due course.

  Receiving no reply, on the 17th I again called. I was then informed that the Convention had decided to have my paper read on the 21st (today).

  On the 20th I received notice that my paper was placed on the list for that day (yesterday) and on examining the list I found it at the end, there being about a dozen papers in all to be read before my one could be heard. I attended the section until the meeting closed but no opportunity of reading my paper was afforded me and on enquiry I was told that the section would not again meet.

  On the list of papers to be read today no mention is made of my paper, and I understood this is the last day of the session.

  I do not propose to allude to the paper I intended reading beyond saying that I was most anxious to bring the question with which it deals before the public through the British Association. I submit merely the bare facts connected with a fruitless effort on two occasions and point out to you how difficult it has proved for a total stranger to get a hearing. I shall not further trouble you with any comments, but I must express my very great regret that I have felt it necessary to make you aware of my feelings.

  In general, when angry, Fleming cultivated an air of pique rather than confrontation. The Dublin snub, however, was the sort of wounding that he could not forgive or forget. Allusions to it appear in all his writings, whenever the question of standard time comes up. It had been a terrible two years: the parliamentary inquiries, newspaper criticism, satirical cartoons, the loss of the CPR commission. As Hemingway put it in “My Old Man,” “Seems like once they get started, they don’t leave a guy nothing.”

  He never openly speculated on the reason for his deselection from the session, but there is evidence that Airy himself had intervened against his appearance. Airy, distinguished but irascible, was the very man who had introduced standard time to Britain nearly thirty years earlier. Whatever his reasons—age (he was seventy-eight), jealousy, or perhaps even a fear that the observatory might lose its profitable monopoly on the selling of Greenwich charts—he ridiculed Fleming’s various papers up to the time of his retirement two years later:


  I set not the slightest value on the remarks extending through the early parts of Mr Fleming’s paper. Secondly, as to the need of a Prime Meridian, no practical man ever wants such a thing. If a Prime Meridian were to be adopted, it must be that of Greenwich, for the navigation of almost the whole world depends on calculations founded on that of Greenwich. Nearly all navigation is based on the Nautical Almanac, which is based on Greenwich observations and referred to Greenwich Meridian, and the number of Nautical Almanacs sold annually exceeds, I believe, 32,000. But I, as Superintendent of the Greenwich Observatory, entirely repudiate the idea of founding any claim on this. Let Greenwich do her best to maintain her high position in administering to the longitude of the world, and Nautical Almanacs do their best, and we will unite our effort without special acclaim to the fictitious honour of a Prime Meridian.

  Airy’s conclusion strikes the scornful, above-the-battle stance to which astronomy often aspires. (One need only recall the arguments recorded in Dava Sobel’s Longitude, the contempt of an earlier astronomer-royal, Sir Nevil Meskalyne, for the provincial clock-maker John Harrison.) Airy’s recommendation to the Privy Council was to abstain from any “novelty” or “social usage,” on the principle that government intervention might prove more harmful than the recognized inconveniences enumerated in Fleming’s paper. He closed on a note of sheer condescension, suggesting that Fleming and the Canadian Institute would do better to petition the Dock Trustees of London, Liverpool, and Glasgow.

  Why such an attitude from the man who, in 1852, had introduced the daily dropping of a public time-ball tied to the Greenwich signal? It was Airy who had brought standard time and all of its advantages to Britain. Was he merely protecting his place in history, jealous of a younger man, a foreigner with a broader but less scientific vision? Or was it the reluctance that comes with long tenure to engage or endorse a possible fad? Or something more calculating, fear that Greenwich under Fleming’s plan might lose its profitable preeminence in the world? Britain, it should be remembered, thanks largely to Airy himself, was unaffected by the dangers and dislocations caused by the rampant time standards of North America and the rest of the world. They were above it all.

  And there is an even more convincing argument. Fleming’s 1878 paper had proposed a prime meridian, but it did not run through Greenwich. The Colonial Office was only too happy to withdraw its support or, indeed, to be relieved of having to take any position. Airy’s successor, a supporter of standard time, could not provide a motive for Airy’s unfortunate behavior.

  6

  The Practice of Time

  Time was in the air.

  —E. T. D. MYERS, former president,

  American Railroad Association (1904)

  FIFTY YEARS AGO people of modest means used telephones only for local calls. Awful news arrived by telegram. “Wires” communicated a palpable respect for time and space. Distance meant dread, delivered in a yellow envelope. The farther the distance, the greater the certainty, the deeper the tragedy. Return messages took agonizing hours. I remember standing under tall tables in small-town Western Union offices in the Deep South, watching my mother edit out words or try new combinations that might save a dime, or pare a message down to its purest feeling.

  When I was seven years old, in Leesburg, Florida, in 1947, our next-door neighbor, known only as Big Mama to the children in the neighborhood who gathered nightly on her porch, told us stories of her adolescence and marriage—before the Civil War. Here was Time embodied, in the traditional Southern manner, through tales and a survivor’s voice. It was my moment, like Dan on Pook’s Hill.

  After Big Mama, Faulkner’s voice, when I got to college, seemed almost neighborly. And long after college, I came across Walt Whitman’s “The Night I heard the Learn’d Astronomer”:

  I wander’d off by myself

  in the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time

  Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. [Emphasis added.]

  How Whitmanesque—that the starlight falling on earth (on him!) that night was as young as the evening and ancient beyond calculation. It was his privilege to wander between the new and the ancient. What a perfect example of a “new” American voice, a voice for the rails, the goldfields, the war, free of New England, free of constraint, unafraid to celebrate the rawness of his vision. And now I can’t help wondering who, exactly, that “learn’d astronomer” might have been. Perhaps it was Sir John Herschel, England’s grand old man of astronomy, the first scientist in the nineteenth century (way back in 1828) to propose a reform of the equinoctial day. Or the young Simon Newcomb, the Canadian-born scourge of standard time, long-standing enemy of Fleming, and, eventually, head of the U.S. Naval Observatory.

  The poets’ broadest intuitions are confirmed by modern science. We are eternal. Our bodies are the skeletons of dead stars and in the fullness of time we return to our makers. The universe seems a vast Manichean metaphor—the super-hot, super-dense quantum cloud, timeless and spaceless, of infinite heat and density that preceded the big bang, twinned to the universal collapse of light and matter into the infinite gravity of the black hole. From one, the universe and all its creations, including time, are released. From the other, nothing, not even time, escapes. Both are mathematically inexpressible “singularities,” predicted, but even resisted, by Einstein. In the Alpha and Omega of creation, contrary to his assurance, God does play dice with the universe.

  Seven years after those Florida nights, in the mid-1950s, my parents moved north to Pittsburgh (as it is now spelled). Since they both worked, often till midnight, I found myself going to movies three nights a week during my high school years. Movies ran continuously, like New York subways. We entered, we sat, we munched our popcorn, and we watched the movie. The moment we sat, no matter how deep into the plot it might have been, became our beginning, our prime meridian. We stayed through “The End,” but the movie’s “end” was just another meridian; we still had half a movie to go before our movie, our “day,” could end. We stayed through the cartoon, the news, the coming attractions, which for us were not introductions nor trailers but an interruption of the feature. For us, the opening credits came in the middle. We already knew the ending—the suspense was learning how it started. Everyone who entered as we did fashioned a different movie; they left when their beginning came round again, making it their end. And so, everyone in the theater watched the same movie, but also a different one, based on one’s private beginning or, in terms of this book, one’s own prime meridian. Because each of us had different plot preparation and different depths of reference, some of the audience laughed when others were sober. Some of us snickered at tender or suspenseful moments.

  Was there one movie, a dozen, or a possible infinity? That’s what time had been like before the Prime Meridian Conference.

  THERE CAN be only one sunrise and one sunset per day. The rotation of the earth is “natural,” God-given, but there is no limit in theory (and sometimes in practice) to the number of hours that make up that day, or how many minutes we choose to call an hour. They are “rational,” man-made. There is nothing God-given in the length of the second, minute, or hour. Traditional Japanese timekeeping had employed flexible hours, expanding in the summer, shortening in the winter, to keep pace with the sunrise and sunset. The French Revolution in its zeal to create a new consciousness, dictated hundred-minute hours, a twenty-hour day, the ten-day week, and twelve thirty-day months per year. Despite the appeal of decimalization, however, not even Robespierre could change the simple fact imposed by nature that each “day” marks one rotation of the earth, and that the year marks one complete orbit around the sun. And even the French Revolution could not suppress the fact that every longitude on earth experiences the sunrise at a different local time. In recognition of the French, however, it should be admitted that even though the Revolution failed to rewire the human consciousness, France never really abandoned—nor did it fail in—its overpowering ambition. In the modern w
orld, the French mania for universal order has been rewarded. We don’t observe hundredminute hours, but we do observe universal time, such as the airlines’ Zulu time, regulated by a signal originating in Paris.

  So why do we observe the Greenwich meridian, and not that of Yokohama, New York, or Buenos Aires? This was the question faced by Sandford Fleming in 1878, at the time of his second time proposal. He had abandoned the buried chronometer of his first paper, the complicated watch-faces and the interchange-ability of time and longitude. He clung only to the notion of a universal day, the twenty-four time zones and his signature twenty-four-hour clock. The popular, or democratic, answer to the question of Greenwich is that most of the world’s shipping employed Greenwich charts, which made Greenwich the obvious choice on the basis of convenience alone. So why the delay? Fleming was alert to the fact and sensitive to the feelings behind it, that the election of a British prime was sure to arouse national enmities, especially from the proud tradition that would be forced to surrender its ligne sacrée, the Paris meridian, nine minutes and twenty-two seconds ahead of Greenwich. The French position, which Fleming supported (up to a point) was that there should be scientific, not merely commercial, reasons for choosing an international standard.

  There were overwhelming historical, economic, and political reasons for choosing Greenwich, but not necessarily any compelling astronomical reason; that is, it bore no scientific rationale. No single longitudinal meridian is scientifically superior to any other, and astronomers pride themselves on a tradition of lofty disinterest in mundane affairs. Many astronomers, in fact, opposed the entire standard-time movement on the grounds that it might possibly involve them in matters they considered merely political—that is to say, unworthy. All north-south meridians are equal; it’s the east-west meridians, the latitudes, that are scientifically predetermined. No one would designate the fortieth degree of latitude as an equator, even if the majority of the world’s population lived along it. There can be only one equator, but every longitude on earth, every great arc that passes over the two poles, revolves about the sun once a day. Paris or Washington or Yokohama are no different from any place else, including the empty Pacific, so why should Greenwich be favored above any other?