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

by Clark Blaise

  “Local time” is a familiar expression, but it is entirely incorrect. There is no such thing. The expression “local time” is based upon the theory that time changes with the longitude; that each meridian has a separate and distinct time. Let us follow this theory out. Take a hundred or a thousand different meridians. All meridians meet at two common points, one in each of the hemispheres, the poles, so that at each of these points we would have a hundred or a thousand different “local times.” This only requires to be stated to establish the impossibility and absurdity of the theory that in nature there is a multiplicity of “local times.” There is one time only, it is a reality with an infinite past, an infinite future, and continuity is its chief attribute. It may be likened to an endless chain, each link inseparably connected with its fellow links, while the whole moves onward in unalterable order. Divisions of time, like links in an unbroken chain, follow one another consecutively; they have no separate contemporaneous existence; they continue portions of the one time. Time remains uninfluenced by matter, by space, or by distance. It is universal and essentially non-local. It is an absolute unity, the same throughout the entire universe, with the remarkable attribute that it can be measured with the nicest precision.

  That warning, six years after the Prime Meridian Conference that had settled standard time for the world, is a fair introduction to Fleming’s engineering mind. Time was a unity with many facets (at least twenty-four), and he strenuously opposed the notion that any one claimant, even Greenwich, possessed a special time. It is the reason he fought stubbornly for the adoption of a “universal day” (sometimes called “cosmic” or “terrestrial”), free of any geographical determinant, free also of the familiar twenty-four time zones.

  Through force of circumstances [his essay continues] we are now obliged to take a comprehensive view of the entire globe in considering the question of time-reckoning. We should not confine our view to one limited horizon, to one country, or to one continent. The problem presented for solution to the people on both hemispheres is to secure a measurement of the one universal passage of time common to all, which shall be based on data so incontrovertible and on principles so sound as to obtain the acceptance of the generations which are to follow us.

  Those comments sum up the difference between Fleming and the American pioneers of standard time. He worked on a universal scale, they on a national. The next time I use the words “local time,” please supply them with quotation marks, preceded by “so-called,” courtesy of Sandford Fleming.

  IN THE LATE 1840s, Henry David Thoreau sought refuge from the quiet desperation of town life and society by withdrawing to Walden Pond. Walden, like many classic texts, including the concluding “The Dynamo and the Virgin” chapter in Henry Adams’s Education, can be interpreted by a willful reader as a reflection on temporality as well as society, particularly on the changing time standards that were (even then) in the air. Armies of workers were beginning to be regulated by time, the mechanical clock. “Actually,” he wrote, “the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.”

  He has no time: surely a new and disturbing development. Leo Marx, Thoreau’s great exegete, states in The Machine in the Garden that the function of the clock is decisive in Thoreau’s version of capitalism “because it links the industrial apparatus with consciousness. The laboring man becomes a machine in the sense that his life becomes more closely geared to an impersonal and seemingly autonomous system.” Certainly that is true, but there is another focus. Thoreau was alert to frightful new creatures that lurked in the temporal wilderness of mid-century Western culture. Men without time, without integrity. Machine men, emasculated men. He sought solace, like his English Romantic forebears, in the great and permanent forms of nature, in classic texts and Eastern religions. He was caught between the rapid spread of the railroad, which was refashioning the world in its own image, and society’s helplessness before it. The railroad knew no temporal boundaries; men must bow before its demands. Thoreau’s anxiety stemmed at least in part from industry’s assault on what we’d call the time-space continuum. Time was in the air.

  It was the railroad that filled the night with the creak and rumble of traffic, that brought the timbering and ice-harvesting crews, that filled the winter sky with clouds of black smoke. No wonder he remarked, “We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us.” Walden was an assertion of individuality resisting industrialization, an American version (and near-total inversion) of Marx and Engels’s chain-rattling Communist Manifesto, not so coincidentally researched in the same year. In that universally revolutionary year of 1848, while France imploded, Britain prospered. She became the first country in the world to standardize time across her entire territory to the time signal of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. (Irish time was set twenty minutes slower.) That year also saw the publication of Dombey and Son, Dickens’s almost literal demonstration of a railway’s riding upon the back of a distraught, psychologically ruined Mr. Dombey, in which he noted, “There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in.” Dickens, however, saw the train’s power and brute human achievement as potentially restorative, at least to those susceptible to its message, like Mr. Dombey.

  Time, then, was beginning its long association with business and industry, with schedules, with commercial entombment, with depression and anxiety. When I think of time’s draining of personality, the enduring enigma of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) comes to mind, the eponym a ghostly presence in a Wall Street legal office. A character of compelling and enduring mystery, Bartleby is an emblematic wraith of negativity, an anomaly caught between temporal standards, as though waiting to die, or to be born. Present in body, absent in soul, very much the representation of Thoreau’s worker without the “leisure for integrity,” or the “manliest relations to men.”

  “EVEN THE EARLIEST settlers knew about clocks and watches,” writes the American historian Michael O’Malley in Keeping Watch: A History of American Time, “but they understood mechanical timepieces as mere representations or symbols of time, not as the embodiment of time itself.” In the middle of the nineteenth century the nature of time was beginning to change. It was no longer the God-given moral accountant of human folly (as in the parable of the ant and grasshopper: “It’s seven o’clock, have you done your chores?”), but a new player in the sober world of commerce, punctuality, and reliability (“Oh, God, I’ve got ten minutes to get to work!”). It’s an important distinction: Is time allotted by God for our moral uplift, or do we take it (or save it) for our economic and personal betterment?

  There is another way in which Emerson’s essays, Thoreau’s Walden, Hawthorne’s journals, or Melville’s tales are affecting elegies for a passing America. The worldly seafaring tradition of New England had fed Thoreau’s imagination in his months of self-exile. During his year at Walden Pond, Thoreau, an intellectual mariner, was never cut off from Western, even universal, culture. He read the Hindu devotional, Bhagavad Gita, he considered Greek and Latin classics, he imagined (if only to dismiss) voyages to every part of the wider world. The globe and all of history were (almost literally) at his back, and they were, to put it simply, his comforters, his friends. The true terror was the prospects opened up by the railroad, already launching its great westward journey into the darkness of unsettled territories, and in the process draining New England of its traditional leadership role. Portland, Maine, in the 1850s and sixties was larger than either of the emerging metropolises of Atlanta or Houston. For the first time in history, having the sea instead of empty spaces at one’s back was an economic deterrent—or at least a less certain guarantor of future growth. The railroads were spreading and the oceans were their only barriers. Abundant, inexpensive, fertile, unpopulated land became more predictive of future success than a safe harbor, orderly villag
es, settled societies, noble history, books, and intellectual graces.

  Reading the American transcendentalists, in fact, might lead one to think that British Romanticism, chased out of its homeland by the Industrial Revolution, had found a refuge in New England. Britain had embraced technological change so avidly and successfully that nearly every miraculous invention of the first half of the nineteenth century—chemical dyes, the railway, the telegraph, the open-hearth oven—has a British provenance. The decade of the 1850s in England commenced with the opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the leadership provided by that most progressive, most scientifically educated of all royal patrons, Prince Albert. Profits from the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace were plowed back into the building and maintenance of technical colleges. This was Britain’s answer to the universal call to revolution: more industry, more science, more research, broader technical education for the middle classes, science lectures to workingmen’s clubs. The decade ended on the publication of the most influential book of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which became an instant best-seller. But, should I not have made my point, Britain began that decade not just with the Great Exhibition, but with the uniting and vitalizing introduction of standard time.

  ANYONE LOOKING to the future of the two great English-speaking cultures at that moment in history would have predicted for England scientific, material, and economic dominance, under a tone of unwavering rationality. For America, the same futurist might have sketched a path of dreamy agrarianism and genial mysticism with solipsistic tendencies. Given the apparent bent of their national genius, it is striking that pragmatism, that most American of philosophies, the test of validity through life experience, should have arisen in New England a mere forty years later. Something revolutionary must have intervened to turn America away from the New England model and in the direction of heavy industry and technology, and the creation of new models of leadership, ambition and success.

  One such “revolution” was the Gold Rush (1848–49), which focused attention on California and the fastest way to get there before the wealth ran out. Clearly, this left New Englanders at a disadvantage. One can hardly imagine a stronger contrast to the communal democratic traditions of New England than the golem that emerged from those raw, instant settlements in the Sierra foothills, or in the ports of San Francisco and Oakland. From them arose all the antisocial, anti-intellectual, vulgar, violent, and materialist impulses that America’s founding elites and Tocqueville in his darkest moments had had good reason to fear.

  During the next decade, New England took the moral lead in the antislavery debates, but the Civil War (1861–65) cut across the subculture of New England like an ax blade, severing the region, almost uniquely, from direct contact with the war or territorial participation in it. The war brought suffering and death to America on a scale never before or later seen, and along with it came authentic, one might even say existential, issues of sin and redemption in the real world, not in the gothic shadows. The war opened up the Midwest, unleashed industry, and elevated to leadership a new breed of impatient, self-educated, practical materialists, many of them the mechanical men of Thoreau’s nightmare. The railroad men not only wore the railroad on their backs, they seemed to have ingested it as well. The generation of Harvard Unitarians was finished.

  During those twenty years (1850–70) of the testing of the American identity, England was enjoying unchallenged hegemony over the world. “Sleeping giants” were everywhere in the 1860s—Russia, Germany, and the Japanese Empire notably, and there was always the uncertain fate of the chronic “sick man,” the Ottoman Empire, which still controlled the restive Balkans, the Middle East, and much of North Africa—but the true sleeping giant was America, and it was only beginning to stir.

  After 1869 in the United States, with the linking of the continent by rail and with the rapid populating of the formerly inaccessible West, the inner rhythm, that inherited sense of ordered time and space whose defining engines had been the horse and the sail metered by the sun, was ripped apart, never to return. Three thousand miles—a six months’ journey around Cape Horn to the goldfields of California in 1848—could be covered in five days inside a single comfortable car. Settlements on the rail line, like Omaha or Denver, became major cities virtually overnight. Chicago quadrupled its population, all because of the rails. The integration of various networks, particularly the railway and telegraph grid (they were inseparable; railroads could not function without telegraphic signaling), demanded coherence and convertibility, and a simplification of the various time standards. Not incidentally, the first proposal for standard time, a way of simplifying the hundreds of bewildering railway schedules, came from a professor in Saratoga Springs, New York, Charles Dowd, and it is dated 1869.

  Since North America extends five solar hours from Newfoundland to the Pacific, and four more to the tip of the Aleutian chain, it offers the possibility of hundreds of viable time standards. Time had been complicated enough when the majority of Americans were clustered along the eastern seaboard and had to negotiate time standards that were rarely greater than half an hour apart. Projecting the same complications across the entire continent was enough to induce temporal nausea. The territory was too vast, and the population growing too numerous—time had lost its meaning. Coordination of command is the reason armies run on military time, or, in our day, that airlines communicate in a single world standard called “Zulu.” Out on the frontier in the nineteenth century it didn’t matter to cowboys what time it was on the cattle drive, or when they hit Dodge City for a drink; but if desperadoes planned to rob a mail train, or knock over a bank when the payrolls arrived a few towns away, a crude temporal calculation was necessary.

  ———

  FLEMING’S ARRIVAL as an eighteen-year-old in the unpromising village of Peterborough, Ontario, where tree stumps still cluttered the main street, echoes the arrival of his hero, Ben Franklin, in Philadelphia a century earlier. No position, no parents, just a strong back, a keen mind, and a willingness to work, ready to do anything honorable that returned a decent wage.

  As a result of Franklin’s example, Fleming had probably not wasted a minute without profound self-recrimination. From his earliest diaries, even as a teenager, there emerges a self-portrait of overall gravity, and an expectation of return on invested time. Idle moments in his childhood and adolescence had been spent in chess, sketching and hiking, and dreaming up inventions. On a typical day in April 1843, at the age of sixteen, he sketched a planned monument to Adam Smith. Then, in a scheme worthy of Sir Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson, he devised a “fine exercise to make a plan of some old castle then fill up the building and make it like the supposed original, such as Sea-field, Peathead, Macduff’s (with caves). One of the caves at the Wemyss would make a fine place for drawing a band of robbers.” The afternoon was taken up learning Odell’s Shorthand Alphabet, then studying the recipe for oil paper and another for case-hardening. He sketched a church, designed a roller skate, then copied an extract from Poor Richard’s Almanac: “But thou dost love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of. How much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep, forgetting that the sleeping fox catches no poultry, and that there will be sleeping enough in the grave. Sloth maketh all things difficult, but industry all easy; and he that riseth late must trot all day and shall scarcely overtake his business at night; while laziness travels so slow that poverty soon overtakes him.” Before closing for the night, he described a machine for taking portraits by the silhouette method, then designed a system of pumps for propelling vessels at sea on the principle of Barker’s Mill. (The “Barkers” were charged with removing bark from logs by directing high-powered jets of water.)

  Physically robust, he led a full partying life; hangovers and morning-after flagellations are part of the youthful record, and were never really abandoned. In later years, he was forever retiring to the decks for a smoke, to his study
for brandy and correspondence. His grandchildren remembered even in his old age the smell of cigars and brandy on his breath. Back in Kirkcaldy there was a lass, Maggie Barclay by name, with whom he might have settled, had he stayed. At least John Sang thought so. His letters rarely failed to mention her unchanged beauty and availability.

  In 1843, at age sixteen, he sketched plans for an electrical-storage and light-distribution system. Two years later he wrote in his diary:

  I have been thinking for some time that the charcoal lights of the Magnetic battery might be brought to some practical use. I only require one experiment, but it would be an expensive one for me unless I could meet with a powerful battery, but I don’t think there is one in Canada. It is to try if more than one light can be formed with one set of wires by breaking the connection and interposing charcoal points. If this is the case we have a good and cheap substitute for gas, would give a much better light and at least could be easily adapted to lighting streets or churches just by having a wire like telegraph ones with a charcoal appliance here and there.

  Venture capital was an undeveloped resource in Canada and Scotland, and the prototype was never built.

  And what about Sandford Fleming’s Canada in 1848? It was a rough-hewn place. Montreal was the center of power, culture, and commerce, Quebec City the effective capital. Both conducted themselves as “English” cities. Toronto chafed under its comparative status with Montreal for the better part of a century. (“Hog Town” was Toronto’s dismissive designation, uptight, moralistic, grim, and prissy, until the tide, a virtual tsunami, started turning in Toronto’s favor in the 1960s and onward.) Fleming was then a young man of twenty-one, busily constructing a life, taking his town and harbor surveys, selling his maps, bringing his parents over and settling them on a farm near Lakeview. The outer world barely left an impression. On March 20, 1848, he noted in his diary: “News of the Revolution in France comes to Peterboro this morning.” End of story.