Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time

by Clark Blaise

  In one way, however, Chester Arthur was perfectly placed by history to understand the issues of standard time. He worked well with entrenched power, particularly the railroad establishment, and was disinclined to challenge it. Prior to his assuming high national office, the spoils system had installed him as customs chief of New York Harbor. The same Republican-party machinery placed him on the 1880 ticket with James Garfield. The presidency was then handed to him by an assassin’s bullet. With his gracious manners, charm, honorable Civil War and antislavery record, his basic decency—and those impressive ax-blade muttonchops—he embodied the plush, don’t-rock-the-boat certainties of the Gilded Age. He knew railroads, counting many a rail baron among his friends and patrons, and loved to travel in luxury accommodations. It could be said with a certain degree of admiration that he was one of the least ambitious men ever to hold the office. Yet if any American president, apart from polymaths like Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, or perhaps Jimmy Carter, understood the value of standardization in weights and measures and the role of railroads in forcing change, it might well have been Chester Alan Arthur.

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  Time and Democracy

  THE WIDER, extended narrative of standard time started before that day in Bandoran, Ireland, in 1876, and did not end in the Washington conference in 1884. It did not even start with the involvement of Sandford Fleming. Fleming was the catalyst, the man with a vision at the tipping point, when conventional responses to a growing problem were no longer sustainable.

  Standard time culminated the long march of reason that had begun with the Renaissance. It coincided with the harnessing of a power source that transcended the mechanical limits of human and animal muscle. Perhaps the first great technological advance leading to the Industrial Age began with nothing grander than a teakettle and a curious, anonymous child who observed its top rattling and lifting under the build-up of steam. If so little water so inefficiently channeled could do that, what might more steam, aimed and tightly directed, do? What others saw as a noisy irritation, someone saw as a cheap, easily imitated power-source. Perhaps he grew up to be Giovanni Branca, who in 1628 created a crude steam turbine. Or perhaps he had the misfortune to have been born in France as Solomon of Caus and be confined to an asylum by Cardinal Richelieu for theorizing that the power of steam could out-perform man and beast. In the 1690s steam was powering Thomas Savery’s inefficient vacuum “fountain” pump, but a decade later Thomas Newcomen’s refinement of the same design was pumping water out of England’s deepest mineshafts.

  Unless the ever-deeper mines of Newcastle could be pumped dry, England faced a serious crisis in providing sufficient coal for the open-hearth ovens of its growing iron industry. It took another half-century for the expansive power of steam, and—with the addition of an exterior condenser unit—the contractive force of the vacuum, to be combined in a single effective energy source, James Watt and Matthew Boulton’s reciprocating steam engine (1769). It is the basic invention from which all rotary movement (thanks to Watt’s further refinements), including the railway locomotive, takes off.

  But steam power had to be wedded to rails before the story of standard time could truly begin. Learning to take coals from Newcastle underlay the eventual development of standard time. In the Tyneside coalfields in 1630, young Master Beaumont introduced a system of wooden tracks that permitted a single horse to haul upwards of sixty bushels at a time. Any increase in load capacity, or in efficiency, is indirectly a temporal calculation. Cast-iron rails were introduced to the collieries in 1767, overcoming the commonsense assumption that smooth wheels on even smoother tracks would “naturally” slip and never grip. Another colliery engineer, Master Jessop by name, added the stabilizing inner flange to the iron wheels. The first “iron road,” the Surrey Iron Railway, was chartered in 1801.

  IN A WORLD totally dependent on horsepower and sailing ships, time and distance were tangible barriers to the exchange of information. There were no technical expositions, no annual learned conferences. It wasn’t easy, or even possible, to transport designs or working models from site to site. It was often a matter of luck that accounted for the right entrepreneur meeting the proper engineer at the moment of inspiration. One of those fortunate places for two hundred years happened to be the coalfields and mineshafts of the Tyne River valley, near Newcastle, where necessity and inventiveness and a certain amount of what we’d call today venture capital all came together. What those two centuries of slow progress and intermittent discovery demonstrate, even in the same confined geographic area of Newcastle, is the difficulty of generating synergy in a world of unawakened time.

  With the introduction of steam energy, first as an adjunct to horsepower and eventually as its replacement, businessmen were able to project new models of cost and production, new dreams of higher capacity, lower investment, and faster delivery over wider markets. Rule-of-thumb calculation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, placed the annual cost of maintaining a horse at four times the wages paid to an unskilled laborer. Reducing dependence on the horse was obviously a definitive moment in social and economic history. New business equations began to undermine every “natural”—that is, commonsense or inherited—calculation of energy expended to profit extracted. And if one asks where is time in all that coalfield, underground, horse-drawn activity, the short answer is “mechanical advantage.”

  Elapsed time is equal to distance divided by the rate of speed. The rate is affected by increases in power. As power increases, so does speed; time diminishes and so does perceived distance. It was the slow increase in speed and power—the fusion of rails and steam—that undermined the standards of horse- and sail power and, eventually, the sun itself in measuring time. Gradually, all those new ideas and new applications, moving in the same direction but at varying speeds, created a new comprehension of time and space. And so it took two centuries of steady incremental invention to bring the reciprocating steam engine, in the form of the locomotive, and the iron rail together. Once that happened, the pace of change increased geometrically.

  The early Industrial Age, which closed the Romantic era (James Watt and John Keats both died in 1819), had challenged, or had at least redefined, the Romantic assumption that life was a contest between “mechanical” and “organic” sources of inspiration. The Quarterly Review in 1825 had laid down the challenge, boldly but myopically: “What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stagecoaches!”

  The answer came just four years later, on October 6, 1829, when Stephenson’s “Rocket” won a competition (and a prize of £500) for drawing a twenty-ton load at an average speed of ten miles an hour over a distance of seventy miles in one day. That October morning in Rainhill, England, marked the big bang of the temporal revolution. Aldous Huxley, in his 1936 essay “Time and the Machine,” stated it cleanly: “In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stephenson were part inventors of time.” Less than twenty years later, Britain had become so transformed by the railway that it united itself temporally under the time standard of the Royal Observatory.

  From the 1830s onward, the rate of travel on land and water began to increase geometrically: fourfold, tenfold, a hundredfold, a rate that the cultural historian William Everdell calls, in The First Moderns, “a change in the rate of change.” A year before the Stephenson “Rocket,” in 1828, Sir John Herschel, Britain’s great astronomer, proposed the first (and very technical) revision of astronomical time-reckoning. It would not have affected daily life in any way, but in essence, and by independent reasoning, Herschel had responded to the first industrial probing of the time-space continuum. Eight years later, Thomas Arnold, father of Matthew, witnessed the first train passing through the Rugby countryside and noted in his diary, “Feudality is gone forever.” Institutions rooted in an ancient time-space continuum cannot survive the effects of geometrical extensions of either term in the equation.

  Standard time is the
unexpressed operating system of all interdependent technologies. It can be said that the adoption of standard time for the world was as necessary for commercial advancement as the invention of the elevator was for modern urban development. Britain’s nearly forty-year lead on the rest of the world, temporally and industrially speaking, began at the moment when standard time was adopted. The first decade of standard time in Britain, the 1850s, was Britain’s shining moment.

  IN THE Victorian era, the ancient conflict between faith and science, the organic and the mechanical, was seen as a clash between modes of thought, not just sources of energy. The Victorians labeled them “natural” and “rational.” Natural thought placed man in a created universe overseen by God and maintained by the fixed laws of nature. Time in the natural world was reckoned by the biblically sanctioned solar noon. Any challenge to revealed truth, any faith misplaced in a man-made creation, was condemned as “vanity.” Science, technology, research, mechanical creations, and standard time were all vanities. Under the rational model, however, vanities (humans worshiping their own creations) replaced the natural God. Progress, not salvation, was the goal of man and societies. Standard time served most of the functions of God; it set the standards of trade and commerce, of justice and mercy.

  Standard time, as defined by Western science and diplomacy, the time of treaties and contracts, overrode aboriginal time, Hindu and Buddhist, farmer and fisherman crack-of-dawn time, or setting-sun Muslim and Jewish time. The standard-time day begins at midnight in order to avoid the irregular sunrise and sunset of nature. Standard time is a god of predictability and precision, no longer the Grim Reaper, no longer the moral accountant of sloth and enterprise, but a mild Victorian gentleman. He shows up for work at Greenwich precisely at midnight, every midnight, for all eternity. He polishes the machinery, tightens valves, reads the gauges, and goes to sleep. He’s more than a little bit Protestant. He expects you to be accountable and to show up when you’re supposed to, and feel a little guilty if you don’t.

  IN 1834 an American by the name of Ross Winans invented the bogie, the independently suspended, four-wheel assembly mounted at the ends of each railroad carriage. From that moment on (to choose one of many), European and American history parted ways. The most influential application (trains) of the nineteenth century’s dominant technology (steam) separated, creating different concepts of travel and different designs for mass transport. Major differences between European and American civilization can be predicated on an apparently obscure technical design element.

  The bogie, with its double-axle design, stabilized American carriages, which could then grow longer and heavier. The stability allowed American trains to trace curving trackbeds. American carriage interiors were of an open-bench design, like stadium bleachers (appalling examples of rampant populism to early European visitors) with a coal stove set in the center of the car. Passengers were free to roam about. European carriages employed a two-wheel, straight-axle design that limited the length and weight of their carriages and virtually eliminated the possibility of twists and turns or a contoured railbed. European railway carriages resembled a series of linked stagecoaches, each made up of six-seated independent compartments, served by its own door that opened to the station platform. There was no communicating corridor.

  Since land values in North America were considerably lower than in Western Europe (even though labor costs were higher), there was less incentive for American engineers to plan faster and shorter routes, or to invest as heavily in bridges and tunnels. Even with higher labor costs, North American railroads could be built for about one-third the expense of their European counterparts. Thus, the slower American railroads followed the course of rivers, racing the steamboats and paralleling the canals, until the cheapest and most convenient bridging-site was reached. By 1865 George Pullman had begun constructing luxury cars, diners and sleepers, to take full advantage of the bogie and the extra hours an American passenger was likely to spend aboard. European engineers were forced to think faster, straighter, shorter, and damn the expense. In the case of railways, Europe became the home of speed, America of luxury.

  And finally, the lessons of European history mandated barriers, not openness, between political borders. The compact dimensions of Europe, which could, or even should, have led to continental integration, did precisely the opposite. Deliberate impediments, such as discontinuities in track gauge and incompatible couplers, were introduced and jealously maintained. The same poisoned history kept the English Channel Tunnel on drawing boards for over a century. Mutual suspicion and prejudice also segregated Europe’s Balkan and Iberian wings, preventing them from contributing to “Western” culture.

  In the case of railways, it was feared that an integrated rail system would encourage Russia to invade Germany, or Germany to predate on France by the simple capture of one nation’s rolling stock and riding it to victory. (It’s not an unreasonable assumption; both standard time and the Autobahn came to Germany as logistical adjuncts to military mobilization. Field Marshal von Moltke, in urging the adoption of a single time throughout Germany, where there had been five standards, saw it as the civilian equivalent of military time.) Spain did not standardize its track gauge to the rest of Europe until 1968—an experience that firsttime visitors of my generation remember as a middle-of-the-night transfer at the border outposts of Port-Bou and Cerbère. Until 1911, when France finally adopted standard time, Europe was an unregulated temporal nightmare.

  The relationship between railway convertibility and the standardization of time, as always, was close and mutually dependent. Many European countries, following the early examples of Britain, Sweden, and Switzerland, coordinated their national times to their own national observatories—a Greenwich prime, a Paris, Rome, Uppsala, Bern, Copenhagen, Cádiz, or Berlin prime—but blocked any kind of international standard time. It was only marginally less complicated for a resident of Aberdeen, say, in the middle of the nineteenth century, to know the time in Berlin or Warsaw than it had been two hundred years earlier. History had trained Europeans to view temporal and mechanical convertibility as threats to their national security.

  The struggle for the adoption of standard time was philosophical as well as technical, and goes back to ideas that have flared and subsided throughout human history. Time in its many disguises is part of the great debate over the just derivation of power. Who “owns” time? That is, who holds the ultimate right to negotiate its value—the worker or the boss? The tenant or the lord? The merchant or the priest? Elected officials or an inherited elite? Why are some born slaves to time, and others released entirely from its constraints? In this sense, the Magna Carta was a temporal event; the American Constitution a great temporal document.

  In ancient China, the historian David Landes writes in Revolution in Time, time was a resource and, being a form of value, was the exclusive property of the emperor. Common citizens were even barred by curfew from sharing the night. Each new Chinese emperor was permitted to reset the calendar to his liking and, doubtless, for relief from his creditors. The priestly and imperial monopoly of time certainly had its uses in any royal court. Thousands of workers could be mobilized for decades of un-compensated labor with magnificent results, whatever the social cost, and we’ll never see such results again: the European cathedrals, Great Walls, Pyramids, and Taj Mahals. When time is not equally distributed throughout a society, travelers are turned into nomads, workers into slaves, criminals into lifers, squatters into settlers. It is the horror of the eternal moment. There are no connections, no schedules, no laws. When time is an inherited private property, nothing that reduces its value can be negotiated.

  Landes relates an instructive historical anecdote concerning technical inertia in a natural-time world. When Europeans were scratching the earth with crooked sticks, Chinese were using iron plows. When Europeans were using steel plows pulled by tractors … Chinese were using iron plows. “Without shared time,” he concludes, “there was no marketplace of ideas
, no diffusion or exchange of knowledge, no continuing and growing pool of skills or information—hence a very uneven transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next.”

  Chinese peasants were using iron plows three thousand years after their invention simply because there was no reason for them not to. Social forces, artistic styles, dress, food, and religious practices, like objects in Newtonian physics, persist in their being until restrained or deflected. And it’s not just China; it’s the inevitable result of “natural” thinking. When all behavior and beliefs derive from a single, infallible source, anyone who would defy it, or alter it, is by definition mad, or a heretic. (We don’t have to journey back a thousand years to sample the persistence of natural thinking. In 1999, in the United States, one state voted to exclude the teaching of evolution and the “big bang” in state schools on the basis that “no one was there to observe it.” No marketplace of ideas. A very imperfect transmission of ideas.)

  Any challenge to established periodicity was treated, at best, as a harmless oddity; at worst, a heresy. Elaborate clocks brought by European visitors to the Chinese court were viewed as toys, their donors patronized as clever children. In a world governed by natural rhythms, the aberrant or the innovative is doomed to rejection and isolation, like Galileo, or poor Solomon of Caus. Why work harder? Why improve tools or work conditions? Iron plows are good enough. If it was good enough for my grandfather, it’s good enough for me. The Chinese court exercised a time monopoly, and over the centuries the culture suffered for it.

  The ultimate time theft is slavery, to be permanently on another’s time, never to rest (except by malingering), never to possess (except through charity or theft). Instructive, then, that the most creative manipulation of time in American music was the invention and the property of slaves and their descendants. In classical European music, the percussionist watches the score and waits for his entrance. The skinsman in jazz, by contrast, is in constant communication with time. He is his own Greenwich, setting the tempo, creating the score freshly with every performance. In Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome, the novelist and jazz scholar Stanley Crouch writes: “In jazz, the time doesn’t just pass the way it does as it’s defined on a ticking clock or a metronome; it interprets the tempo through swing, propels you, supports you and it talks to you, comments on your own activity and you talk with it.” Time talks to you, as it did to Keats peering at the Grecian urn, and to Whitman, and to van Gogh as he absorbed the lessons of Japanese woodcuts, and, much later, to Faulkner and Woolf and Proust, and as it has to nearly any serious thinker of the past century and a half. Time talked to them. Time was in the air.