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

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Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time Page 8

by Clark Blaise


  It may seem bizarre today, but relations between Canada and the United States suffered through decades of rhetorical abuse, moments when Canada’s historic fear of absorption matched America’s frustration with the very idea of an alien, bordersharing presence. Throughout the 1870s and eighties, so long as Manifest Destiny remained and even grew as a living cause, faithful newspapers like the Chicago Tribune could be counted on to keep the temperature just short of boiling, should Canada persist in ignoring the inevitable:

  If ever there should be any serious misunderstanding between the United States and Great Britain, it would take but little time before an irresistible American army would cross the frontier, and annexation would be brought about so quickly that it would make the head of the Marquis swim [i.e., the Marquess of Lorne, the governor-general].

  And, later:

  We are willing to put up with many things the Canadians do which we would not tolerate if the British were the immediate agents. The Canadians now divide with the United States the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. We permit them to line our frontier for 3,000 miles with their custom-houses where American goods and American people are subjected to an Inquisitorial process; we permit them to disrupt our frontier; we submit to very many annoyances, with patience, because of the feeling that they are weak, and that it would be ungenerous in us to get angry with them. But let “the majestic” form of the United Empire intrude itself between the two countries, and the United States may decide that the Nation should go in and twist the British Lion’s tail.

  Fleming’s managerial history exposes another curious trait. Not just as an engineer, but in all aspects of his life until the standard-time movement, he was a curiously reticent, or ambivalent, leader. He allowed others to take the credit; perhaps we can say he was an engineer, that tragic profession, to his bones.

  In 1872, Stanford Fleming was appointed Chief Engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, the major financial undertaking of nineteenth-century Canadian history. He delegated authority to crew chiefs who later attacked him. When he cofounded the Canadian Institute in 1850, he chose the role of secretary-treasurer rather than the presidency. On his first surveying tour of the West for the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1872, he installed his closest friend, Reverend George Grant, as expedition historian, the result being Grant’s classic account, Ocean to Ocean. As he gathered support for confederation, J. W. Wood wrote the letters, D’Arcy McGee made the speeches. At the Prime Meridian Conference—his conference, in many ways—he was “attached,” like a satellite, to the British delegation as the representative of Canada, a country that did not exist. Even in his final years, rather than write an autobiography, he practically dictated a biography, Empire-Builder, to his friend Lawrence Burpee.

  He often expressed himself on the engineer’s calling as a kind of secular religion. Its codes were no less rigorous than the Hippocratic oath. In his view, engineering had a noble, almost tragic nature. In 1863 he’d extolled the profession in terms that recall the Book of Isaiah (every valley shall be exalted). “It is one of the misfortunes of the profession to which I am proud to belong that our business is to make and not to enjoy; we no sooner make a rough place smooth than we must move to another and fresh field, leaving others to enjoy what we have accomplished.” By 1876 his views had only deepened:

  Engineers, as you all know, are not as a rule gifted with many words. Men so gifted generally aim at achieving renown in some other sphere.… Silent men, such as we are, can have no such ambition; they cannot hope for profit or place in law, they cannot look for fame in the press or the pulpit, and, above all things, they must keep clear of politics. Engineers must plod on in a distinct sphere of their own, dealing less with words and more with deeds, less with men than with matter; nature in her wild state presents difficulties for them to overcome. It is the business of their life to do battle against these difficulties and make smooth the path on which others are to tread. It is their privilege to stand between these two great forces, capital and labour, and by acting justly at all times between the employer and the employed, they may hope to command the respect of those above them equally with those under them. [Italics added.]

  Those last words proved as much prophetic as elegiac. Almost as though he had seen into his own future, he had delivered a judgment against the state of affairs in Canada, and his role on the Canadian Pacific Railway. He could no longer interpose himself between the demands of politics and capital, and his oath as an engineer.

  Engineers are not paid to play Hamlet—if they must play the prince, better to take direction from Machiavelli. Parliament did not interest itself in engineering complications. The unsurveyed muskeg swamps between Lake Superior and the Manitoba border were found to be inland seas of gelatinous peat, capable of swallowing tons of sand and gravel and whole trains without ever reaching bottom. In one area, seven layers of rail lay buried, one upon the other. Three hundred miles of Ontario muskeg could absorb the personnel and resources—nine thousand men worked on the Lake Superior section alone—of two thousand miles of prairie track. There was no existing text, no standard of engineering to which anyone could appeal. Blasting, filling, and bridging through the Canadian Shield cost upwards of $700,000 a mile. The economical solution, sharing lines between Chicago and northern Minnesota, was of course politically unworkable.

  The closing act in the engineering career of Sandford Fleming was his inability to decide on a proper route through the Rockies, the northern Yellowhead Pass (west of today’s Edmonton), or the southern Kicking Horse. Unable to resolve it, he wasted years in surveys and second and third opinions, and a second personal survey. His indecision kept construction and surveying parties paid and provisioned, but often idle through the harshest winters on the continent. In that robust, high-wage, labor-scarce railroad-building era, it was difficult to keep crews together, especially when the chief himself appeared to be dithering in Ottawa and London. Some members defected, some complained to Fleming or to parliament. One built the street railroads of Oslo. Others left for India and the West Indies. Many more signed on with American railroads.

  5

  The Decade of Time, 1875–85

  BY THE MIDDLE of the 1870s, the assertion of human reason over the processes of nature was yielding discoveries and inventions in all the arts and sciences that lent that famous Victorian confidence to the notion that man was no longer the passive inheritor of an ordained “natural” universe. All of nature was his to discover and mold. The ability to communicate instantaneously by voice, to light the dark, the luxurious trans-Atlantic steamers, the transcontinental railroads, a new personal printing press called the typewriter, bound the world in exciting and, for some, alarming new ways. But the outworn shell of time, those heavy boots inherited from tradition, from nature, were impeding progress. Societies were moving faster than their ability to measure.

  Before railroads began serving every “civilized” part of the globe (as the Victorians were fond of calling it), the sun had set the temporal rhythm. Two cities set one hundred miles apart maintained an eight-minute temporal separation. But a train could cover a hundred miles in less than two hours—so which town’s “time” was official? Which standard should be published? The train itself might have originated in a city five hundred miles distant. Who, therefore, “owned” the time—the towns along the route, the passengers, or the railroad company?

  The burden was entirely on the passenger. Railroad companies owned the time. Upon entering larger stations where a transfer between lines might be necessary, American passengers would study clocks set along a wall behind the ticket counter, each announcing the time standards of competing “roads.” The clocks would not read: “New York,” “Chicago,” “New Orleans,” and “Cincinnati,” but rather, “Erie & Lackawanna,” “New York Central,” and “Baltimore & Ohio.” Each separate time reflected the standard at the company’s headquarters. The Pennsylvania Railroad maintained Philadelphia time along its entire route, while New
York Central kept the “Vanderbilt time” of Grand Central Station. If a passenger wondered when he might arrive at his final destination, he had to know the time standard of the railroad that was taking him there, and make the proper conversion to the local time at his boarding, and that of his eventual descent.

  For example, if you were a Philadelphia businessman in the 1870s with an appointment to keep in Buffalo, transferring in Pittsburg (as it was then spelled), you would of course have to know the departure time in Philadelphia local time (just as you would today)—unless the train had originated in Washington or New York, in which case it might depart according to the local time of those stations, a few minutes earlier or later than your local Philadelphia time. It was your responsibility to know the difference. Thereafter, you entered a twilight zone of competing times.

  Pittsburg, five degrees of longitude west of Philadelphia, adhered to the sundial precision of its solar noon, which came twenty minutes after Philadelphia’s. The train you’d catch in Pittsburg to take you up to Buffalo originated, however, in Columbus, Ohio, three degrees west of Pittsburg. That translated to twelve minutes earlier than local Pittsburg time, or thirty-two minutes earlier than the time on your still-uncorrected Philadelphia watch. A train arriving in Pittsburg from Philadelphia at five o’clock Philadelphia time would find that it was only 4:40 in Pittsburg (which was irrelevant, unless you were leaving the station and staying in the city), but that the Columbus train would be arriving twelve minutes before that, at 4:28 Columbus time. And when you finally arrived in Buffalo (assuming you didn’t miss your train), you’d be confronted with Buffalo’s three official times, based on the three railroads that served the city—a philosophical conundrum that had, in fact, spurred Professor Charles Dowd’s first serious attempt, in 1869, at temporal rationalization. For Dowd, the temporal conflicts created absurdity. Passengers were made hyperconscious of time, of each passing minute, in ways we cannot imagine today. For many passengers, it created anxieties bordering on agony.

  No wonder Oscar Wilde, the serenely contemptuous child of British standard time, noted that the chief occupation in an American’s life was “catching trains.” No wonder Sandford Fleming cautioned against even the mention of “local time.”

  All of those times, in Pittsburg, Buffalo, and Philadelphia, were occurring at the same cosmic instant. But whose “now” are we talking about? It depended on what “now” meant. “Now” was composed of three, six, fifty, an infinity of separate times, all of them official, all of them accurate. Today, all three times are in the Eastern time zone; one time fits all. For the gentleman of the 1870s, however, right up to the moment of North American railroad standardization, in 1883 (a year before the world conference), all three times were legitimately (one might even say, morally) distinct. It was up to the traveler—he who would pierce the twelve-mile-wide bubble of local time—not the railroad, to make the adjustment.

  The helpless passenger didn’t yet realize it, of course, but his frustrations had already ignited furious debates behind the scenes. Railroad men, astronomers, grand theorists, diplomats, all quickened to notions of time and new ways of reckoning it. It was a reformer’s cause, an opportunity to sweep away the residual pieties of a “natural” mind-set. Standard time, given the nature of its opposition from religious thinkers, agrarian traditionalists, and the contented, nontraveling public, became a popular symbol of progress and rationality.

  Passengers were demanding something simpler. Proposals were raining down on the engineering profession, the railroad industry, the post and telegraph services. The American Metrological Society (measure reformers), the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Railroad Association, all maintained “time conventions” to monitor their members’ suggestions for purposes of advocating positions, placating the public, and thwarting political intervention. Some of the proposals they studied and even debated were ingenious. Some, in fact, like that of the very persistent Professor Dowd, were prescient. But the railroad industry, rather like today’s Internet, was terrified of government intervention—lest public frustration boil over and attract political involvement—and loath to interfere with its own profitability and entrepreneurial independence.

  Within the Decade of Time, the contradictions between new technology and old time-reckoning passed from inconvenience and inefficiency to urgency and, finally, to danger.

  Ships of different nationalities could not communicate their positions at sea, due to competing prime meridians. Railroad accidents were daily events, an inevitability considering that trains on the same track might be employing different times. Meanwhile, the technology continued to evolve; the velocity of the culture continued to increase.

  In that decade, just to name the most obvious examples, the telephone, the electric light, the typewriter, motion pictures and stop-action photography were invented. Even military misadventure could be turned to creative use. In 1871, upstart Prussia defeated France, throwing a proud culture into despair, but forcing a thorough self-examination and restructuring. From that fortunate defeat arose the determination to revolutionize institutions and to create new centralized and “rational” authority to cast off the dead weight of “natural” thought. France built a modern industrial state and unleashed energy that made Paris synonymous with art, culture, experimentation, and revolution. Baron Haussmann redesigned the medieval metropolis, replacing stagnant quarters with broad, railroad-style boulevards.

  In the United States, because of their superior bogie-design, luxurious Pullman cars were carrying passengers from the Atlantic to the Pacific, offering greater comfort on the move than most Americans enjoyed in their homes. Sumptuous steamliners plied the Atlantic in little more than a week, which registered on veterans of the sailing days as instantaneous. Starting in Belgium and spreading quickly to Germany and France, Georges Nagelmackers’s wagon-lit (sleeping-car) service, importing the bogie, was by 1883 serving chilled champagne and hors d’oeuvres of oysters and caviar followed by a full five-star Paris restaurant meal, with the same formal dress code, on the fabled Orient Express all the way from Paris to Istanbul.

  By the end of the decade, then, ordinary man had become superman, speaking over distances, banishing the dark, chilling his wine and beer, and speeding through immemorial landscapes—the buffalo-dotted prairies, southeastern Europe—without regard to local time or outside conditions. Our modern world, for better and worse, was taking shape. Ancient empires were collapsing, particularly in the lawless Balkans. Many of the smaller towns along the Orient Express lines had to be bypassed, not that the passengers noticed, on account of firebombed stations or the murder of crossing guards. The imperial land-grab in Africa and Asia entered its sociopathic phase in the Congo, Tanganyika, and Tonkin, and el-Mahdi was chasing the British and poor Gordon Pasha out of the Sudan, destroying forever the early Victorian pretense of a “civilizing mission.”

  New fields of inquiry turned the techniques of stop-action photography of Eadweard Muybridge, who developed cameras with shutter speeds of 1/200 and 1/500 of a second, on human behavior itself. Sociology and psychology fragmented time into investigative frames, showing, through microanalysis, the irrational to be familiar, and the “normal” to be nothing less than bizarre. Individuals learned they were strangers to their own motivations; societies were seen as structured around prejudice, superstition, and irrationality. In American factories, Frederick W. Taylor introduced “scientific management,” using the stopwatch instead of a stop-action camera to reduce the “natural” habits of laboring men and women to microanalyzable segments, with an aim toward improving productivity by replacing natural routine with rational efficiency. In painting, the impressionists broke with the careful perspective and shadowing of the Salon, the calculated posing and anecdotal portraiture, favoring instead bright shards of pure, unmodulated color, the painterly equivalent of stop-action. Impressionism is as much about time as it is about light. It’s all about time.

  Writers came later to ch
ange, as befits the reflective and reportorial nature of their art, but once they felt themselves in control of time, free to experiment with sequencing, able to shatter “natural” consecutivity, their works grew closer to the stop-and-go flow of consciousness itself. Temporal distortion became the surest way of communicating disturbance, urgency. Readers were stimulated into active involvement. Unbalancing the reader was not merely an instinctive political act, but a proper aesthetic tool for keeping the naked consciousness in focus, free of all that fussy Victorian decor. Conventional plotting, in fact, was regarded as mimicking the path of unconscious repression.

  All these innovations and inventions derive from, or helped to create, an altered relationship to time that we call modernism. It’s easy to trace the effects of time, a little harder to find the moment when it started. The grand events enumerated above all had their modest origins. Ross Winans’s invention of the bogie; George Pullman’s designing—and nearly over-designing for the track bed and existing gauges—the heavy funeral cortege for Abraham Lincoln; the idea for the wagon-lit coming to Georges Nagelmackers when he was sent from Belgium to the United States to forget a failed love affair—only to fall in love with Pullman cars instead; van Gogh’s seeing an exhibit of Japanese woodcuts in Antwerp and falling in love with their pure color and spatial foreshortening. Any number of artists saw Eadweard Muybridge’s panel of stop-action photos of a galloping horse (and a genre of horse-racing paintings died on the spot). Other painters took from physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey’s moving pictures the theory of the persistence of vision. There are obviously dozens of such moments, and cases can be made for each of them as the ur-moment in the birth of a new consciousness.

 

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