by Clark Blaise
Proposals thirteen to sixteen concerned the definitions of local time, and extended assurances that for the vast majority of world citizens going about their daily business, there would be no disruption of accustomed time standards. The seventy-five time standards of North America would shrink to four, but that process was well advanced, and generally supported anyway. There would be twenty-four standards of time for the world, lettered appropriately. “It is intended that local time at any place on the surface of the globe shall generally be regulated by the standard meridian nearest or most convenient to such place in longitude,” read proposal number fourteen.
Fifteen and sixteen went on to designate the naming of the zones by letter to correspond with the letter of the nearest meridian. (By “standard meridian” was meant the fifteen-degree meridians that signaled an hour’s time change.) Rather than living in Pacific or Mountain time, one would be obliged to adjust one’s horizons to the infinitely less pictorial U or T time. Fleming never surrendered his distaste for “local times,” and the chauvinism they engendered. If time for the whole world was regulated by letters instead of descriptive designations, local times (assuming we had an agreed-upon Z) would be drained of their local associations.
Proposal seventeen has Canada written all over it: “It is proposed that standard time shall be determined and disseminated under Government authority; that time signal stations be established at important centres for the purpose of disseminating correct time with precision, and that all the railway and local public clocks be controlled electrically from the public time stations, or otherwise kept in perfect agreement.” He saw time as a free, common resource, not as a privately held property on the order of the American railroads or the sold time signals from the Western Union Company. Fleming was always a government man, deeply suspicious of the motives of capital and profit, a conviction that only grew in coming years. His last great battle with capital, begun in his mid-eighties, saw him launch an inquiry against Canada Cement, a conglomerate that had named him honorary director but whose president and inner circle had enriched themselves, he charged, by watering the stock at the first public offering.
With Fleming’s last three proposals, we enter a mirror-world to every earlier, Greenwich-prime assumption. Since he was calculating from a Pacific (not a Greenwich) Z, moving eastward, not westward, the Y, X, W, and V meridians (that is, the 165th, 150th, 135th, and 120th longitudes) all fell over the open Pacific. North America began at the 105th degree of west longitude of California and British Columbia, not with the more customary 60th degree of Newfoundland. California and the Pacific-rim states and provinces thus made their debut as the landfall—the first, not the forgotten, entities.
Proposals eighteen, nineteen, and twenty concerned the application of the system to North America. There would be four standards, U, T, S, and R, running from west to east. Standard U would extend eastward to Idaho, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada. The next standard, T, would include all of Mexico, and the Plains states and provinces as far east as Kansas, the Dakotas, Texas, and Manitoba. Standard S covered all states on both sides of the Mississippi River, plus Michigan, and R kept time for everyone else, all the way to Nova Scotia.
Fleming summarized his scheme, however turned-around it might appear to us (and doubtless, to some of the East Coast and European delegates in Venice), with his usual insouciance:
The foregoing is a general outline of the proposition. It must be evident that the system of cosmopolitan time would be a ready means of meeting the difficulties to which I have referred. It would render it predictable to secure uniformity, great simplicity, perfect accuracy, and complete harmony. The times of places widely differing in longitude would differ only by entire hours. In all other respects standard time in every longitude and latitude would be in perfect agreement. In theory every clock in the world would indicate some one of the twenty-four hours at the same instant, and there would be perfect synchronism with the minutes and seconds everywhere around the globe.
By the system proposed, instead of an infinite and confusing number of local days, following the sun during each diurnal revolution of the earth, we should have twenty-four well-defined local days only; each local day would have a fixed relation to the others, and all would be governed by the position of the sun in respect to the prime meridian. Those twenty-four local days would succeed each other at intervals of one hour during each successive diurnal revolution of the globe. The day of each locality would be known by the letter or other designation of its standard meridian, and the general confusion and ambiguity which I have set forth as the consequence of the present system would cease to exist.
His proposals were approved, and became the basis of the World Geodesic Congress’s recommendation for action. Cleveland Abbe, Frederick Barnard, and Fleming raised the issue of a Prime Meridian Conference to settle the issue of a prime once and for all. The delegates assented but delayed until their next meeting, two years hence in Rome, thus allowing their well-placed officers to make approaches to the American government. Fleming, following Abbe’s advice, immediately set to work with personal memos and speeches to American chambers of commerce, railroad conventions, and shipping and insurance companies, as well as with more formal approaches through the governor-general and the British Colonial Office. His proposals closed with a signature flourish: the demand for the twenty-four-hour clock, the eradication of that temporal anomaly that had got him started five years earlier.
By 1883 North American railroads had standardized their times according to Mr. Allen’s designs, and on the Continent the first service between Paris and Constantinople had been launched. Time was in the air, and on the ground, and for the first time in history a coherent system for regulating it had been proposed. Only a final meeting stood between a Fleming-inspired standard-time system for the world and what appeared to be its foregone diplomatic ratification in Washington, and that was the 1883 Rome meeting of the Geodesic Congress.
FLEMING’S EARLIER papers, particularly his presentations at the Canadian Institute in January and February 1879, “Time-reckoning and the Establishment of a Prime Meridian,” had been forwarded to eighteen countries by the Marquess of Lorne (the governor-general), and to London for review and general circulation. There, they had met with the astronomer-royal’s disapproval. In 1881, Airy would not be alive for the next stage of the battle, and his successor as astronomer-royal fully endorsed the standard-time reform.
Defections from prominent astronomers must have been painful to Fleming, especially that of Simon Newcomb, chief of the U.S. Naval Observatory, and in later years, author of a still-useful astronomy text. Newcomb was something of a self-taught mathematical genius. He was also a notoriously difficult and rather eccentric individual, but a close friend to his fellow Washington astronomer, that genuinely pleasant soul, Cleveland Abbe. When Fleming had sent out a questionnaire on the utility of standard time to the membership of the American Society of Civil Engineers, he kept the dozens of responses neatly bundled in their appropriate envelopes—all except those of the astronomer Simon Newcomb. To the third question, “Do you consider it advisable to secure a time system for this country which would commend itself to other nations and be adopted by them ultimately?” Newcomb had responded: “No! We don’t care for other nations; we can’t help them, and they can’t help us.”
Fleming’s second question which read, “Do you favour the idea … of bringing the Standards of Time of all countries into agreement?” got an even more unwelcome response: “See no more reason for considering Europe in the matter than for considering the inhabitants of the planet Mars.” The opposition of Newcomb worried Fleming sufficiently that he felt obliged to warn others, with uncharacteristic violence (but always inside quotation marks), of his unnamed presence as “a niggar in the fence” (sic), a hidden, treacherous obstruction to any scheme for world standardization. Other dissenting astronomers saw the drawing of a prime meridian, if it had any virtue at all, as an opportunity to right hist
orical and religious wrongs: Piazzi Smyth, of course, plumped again for the Great Pyramid of Giza. Others spoke up for Pisa, to honor Galileo, Jerusalem, or the Azore Islands, the original European prime. Everyone realized, however, that there were only three true contenders: Greenwich, Paris, and Fleming’s “nether arc.”
Fleming had his reliable supporters from the astronomy fraternity, like Otto Struve of Russia, and the Spanish, Italian, and Mexican astronomers who were delegates in Rome and would be in Washington as well. At the Rome conference of 1883, Fleming reiterated many of his older ideas, but this time pushed harder for an anti-Greenwich prime, that is, the Pacific Z meridian.
Resolutions three, four, five, and six at the Rome meeting concerned the prime, and the vote could not have been reassuring for Fleming. Greenwich, on the basis of the popularity of its charts and the number of countries already employing it, won the vote simply on grounds of sheer convenience. Fleming’s antiprime was the choice of many, like Struve and Juan Pastorín of Spain, and was judged an acceptable second choice should Greenwich, for some reason—“national susceptibilities” being the obvious—not be adopted at the upcoming Washington conference. In the fourth resolution, delegates voted to count the meridians with consecutive numbers in a single direction, zero to 360, not splitting the earth into 180 degrees of east and west longitudes. This, too, was Fleming-inspired. Double-counting the longitudes was as distasteful to his sense of time’s “flow” as double-counting the hours of the day.
Resolutions five and six concerned the universal day, and handed Fleming a curious victory. The universal day would start at midnight on the Pacific anti-prime, that is, when it was noon (of the previous day) at Greenwich. This would permit the unification of the astronomer’s professional day with that of the universal day (astronomers traditionally counted their day from noon till the following noon in order to preserve a single calendar date for their nighttime observations.)
All exceptions to standardization, the various “professional days,” would eventually have to fall. Astronomers could be counted on to resist, just as admirals had when the nautical day had been eliminated in Nelson’s time. Both professions held themselves apart from the midnight start of the civil day. (The traditional nautical day had also run from noon to noon, which retarded many naval communications by a whole calendar day, with catastrophic results in history.) The nautical day had already been regularized in most countries, but without an internationally binding protocol, hot spots of resistance might flare. Fleming’s dual-track time, the elaborate system of letters and numbers, and his imaginative responses to anticipated French objections to Greenwich, were under serious threat.
OCTOBER 1, 1884; WASHINGTON, D.C.
VIEWED FROM A distance of a century and a quarter, the Prime Meridian Conference seems thoroughly contemporary in its mixture of good science and bad politics, and doomed to failure by the inevitable friction between their fundamental cultures. The subject to be decided might seem more suited to a philosophy seminar than a crowded hall hazy with cigar smoke. Put simply, it was to decide where time begins, and the proper way to measure it.
Once the conference was under way, however, politics—in its worst sense—took a leading role. Science establishes bedrock methods and principles that cannot be compromised, knowing that the fudging of science is the destruction of reason. Diplomacy fashions a world of elaborated compromise, transforming differences of language, culture, race, and religion into the formulas of treaty and protocol, knowing that the alternative to negotiation is the breakdown of civilization. Only a subject as broad as time could even begin to bring such diverse positions together.
There were only twenty-five “civilized” (independent) countries recognized by the United States in 1884, one in Asia (Japan) and one in Africa (Liberia), the rest in South America, Western Europe, and the Caribbean, plus Hawaii and Russia. When President Arthur sent out invitations in December 1883, all twenty-five answered the call. Ten months later, however, due to cholera quarantines affecting the Mediterranean countries, only nineteen nations were able to make the opening. Five of the thirty-five delegates present represented the host country, four were from Britain (including Mr. Fleming, an “honorary” member from the unrecognized Dominion of Canada), two from France, three from Russia. The representatives of Turkey and Japan, an ambassador and an astronomer respectively, were the only non-Christians. Dual or multiple representation usually indicated the presence of an astronomer, along with the sitting Washington ambassador. When, by the third session, all late-comers were seated, it was apparent that only Denmark did not bother to attend. Fleming, always the multi-tasker, left Ottawa ten days before the opening in order to attend board meetings in Montreal. Ever meticulous, he made note of his finances ($212 on hand), of his accommodations (the Biggs Hotel), and of his attending Negro church services with Professor Abbe. He noted the first day’s temperature as well: ninety degrees, following the hottest and driest summer on record.
President Arthur’s letter, though formal and formulaic, was to serve as a general guide, in good diplomatic fashion, through coming difficulties:
In the absence of a common and accepted standard for the computation of time for other than astronomical purposes, embarrassments are experienced in the ordinary affairs of modern commerce; that this embarrassment is especially felt since the extension of telegraphic and railway communications has joined states and continents possessing independent and widely separated meridional standards of time; that the subject of a common meridian has been for several years past discussed in this country and in Europe by commercial and scientific bodies, and the need of a general agreement upon a single standard recognized; and that in recent European conferences especially, favor was shown in the suggestion that, as the United States possesses the greatest longitudinal extension of any country traversed by railway and telegraphy lines, the initiatory measures for holding an international convention to consider so important a subject should be taken by the United States Government.
President Arthur’s letter manages to indicate that the conclusions of preparatory conferences, such as Rome and Venice, were to be considered. The link (the “embarrassment”) between the speed of railway and telegraph communications and the confusions of national primes is noted. And if the president’s letter was not specific enough, the group was soon to be addressed by the secretary of state, Frederick Frelinghuysen, who set the agenda succinctly:
It gives me pleasure, in the name of the President of the United States, to welcome you to this Congress, where most of the nations of the earth are represented. You have met to discuss and consider the important question of a prime meridian for all nations. It will rest with you to give a definite result to the preparatory labors of other scientific associations and special congresses, and thus make those labors available. [Italics added.]
The phrases “definite result” and “make those labors available” are loaded indeed, and would come to play a definitive role in the next three weeks. Results, not further deliberations, were expected. The obscurities of science were to be made “available”—that is, legally binding. The Washington conference was to be a diplomatic, not a scientific, show.
Secretary Frelinghuysen’s opening remarks commending the findings of “other scientific associations and special congresses” practically enthroned Greenwich before a vote could even be taken. Those congresses, especially the 1883 meeting in Rome, had already settled on Greenwich as the most logical and least disruptive choice, while regarding Fleming’s anti-prime as a not unreasonable alternative. American railroads, whose new standardization ran on Greenwich-based time zones, had already threatened a strike if anything but Greenwich were chosen. But officially—that is, diplomatically—Greenwich was just another national prime, equal but not superior to ten others.
If Greenwich prevailed, ten proud astronomical traditions, along with their charts and maps, would have to be scrapped. Nine of the countries might go gently, but there was one that c
ould be counted on to resist any assault on the dignity of its ligne sacrée, the Paris meridian.
LACKING AFFILIATION with a member country, Fleming had been accredited to the British delegation. His fellow British delegates included Professor Adams of Cambridge, the 1845 “plotter-by-planetary-perturbation” of Neptune; General Strachey of the Indian Army and the Council of India, who had hosted the 1869 eclipse party to South India; and Captain Sir Frederick Evans, the head of Britain’s Naval Observatory. Cleveland Abbe and the secretary of the American Railroad Association, William F. Allen, were among the five American delegates. The others were Admiral Christopher Rodgers from the Naval Observatory, Commander Sampson of the navy, and the astrophysicist and spectroscopist Lewis Rutherfurd, another veteran of the Indian eclipse. Rear Admiral William T. Sampson and Rutherfurd, in particular, were formidably articulate, aggressive, and well-prepared.
The impressively white-bearded Admiral Rodgers was nearing retirement age, but Commander Sampson’s glory days were still before him. He would enter American military history as the victor of the Battle of San Juan Harbor during the Spanish-American War, the man most responsible for the acquisition of Puerto Rico for the United States. He would even model men’s suits in mail-order catalogues, an early instance of military-industrial cooperation. The two French delegates were the ambassador, Monsieur Lefaivre, and Jules-César Janssen, the world’s leading spectroscopist and the founder-director of the Meudon Observatory in Paris. Many of the scientists were old friends, well known to each other from eclipse parties and various professional congresses. Never, however, had they been asked to represent the interests of their countries.
Janssen is an especially attractive figure, although the role he was asked to play in Washington would cast him, in the popular press, as a pig-headed obstructionist. Originally a musician from a struggling family, and with no more formal education than Fleming, he had trained himself in ophthalmology, writing a thesis on the effect of the sun’s rays upon the cornea. Rather than set himself up as an eye doctor, however, he had turned his attention to the rays themselves, devising the most sophisticated ways of capturing and analyzing light from the sun and other stars. His 1869 photos were classics in their day and are cited and studied even to this day.