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

by Clark Blaise

  Most of this book is an application of Myers’s modest but far-reaching insight. Time was in the air in every human endeavor. The standardization of time, the overthrow of “natural” time, were necessary preconditions to scientific, technological, and artistic innovation and experimentation, and they all came together in the decade of time.

  Allen was on surer ground in claiming that the adoption of standard time had a cascading effect on other forms of standardization, among them track gauges, uniform couplers, safety standards, freight rates, and wage scales. Until standardization, the Baltimore & Ohio, America’s oldest railroad, had employed a seemingly sanctified track gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches ever since its founding in 1830. Most railroads, with the exception of the Erie, followed the B&O. That width, however, had been the standard separation of stagecoach wheels, a standard that, in turn, commemorated the distance between the centers of stone tracks on Roman roads built to accommodate the axle length of military chariots. And so goes the process of natural thought, unchanged for two thousand years. Thus do Chinese iron plows come to America.

  Allen was an engineer, not a philosopher, but his claims are philosophically germane to the larger concerns of this book. Standardization of time was a sophisticated abstraction that actually improved practical commerce, and lent communications “real time” coordination. Standardization of time is part of an ever larger shift of consciousness, toward secular rationalism, and away from “natural” authority. And standardization was not solely a reflection of railroad convenience. In his capacity as America’s chief weather forecaster, Cleveland Abbe received dozens of hourly, data-bearing weather transmissions from dozens of offices, hundreds and even thousands of miles away. In the local-time world of the 1870s and early eighties, he had to translate each of those separate local times of transmission into a single “real time” in order to track the movement of storm fronts and weather patterns. Without standard time, his “probabilities,” as he insisted on calling his forecasts, would have had as much accuracy as the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

  William Allen, Charles Dowd, and Sandford Fleming are the acknowledged fathers of standard time, but only Fleming spoke to the world. Allen’s role is today celebrated with a gleaming bronze plaque in the remodeled grand concourse of Washington’s Union Station that remembers him as the “devisor and implementer” of standard time for North American railroads. Sir Sandford Fleming boasts a historical marker on a knoll outside the public library in his native Kirkcaldy, Scotland, where he is memorialized as “the inventor of standard time for the world.” Charles Dowd, the tragic figure among the three, died in a railroad-crossing accident in Saratoga Springs in 1904, and was memorialized with a bronze plaque in the First Presbyterian Church of Saratoga Springs for his role as educator and inventor of standard time. Fire razed the church in 1976. Only a few un-melted fragments of his memorial were saved.

  Part Two

  TIME WAS IN THE AIR

  7

  Notes on Time and Victorian Science

  THE SPEECHES and papers on the Lake Ontario beaches and the formation of Toronto Harbour that Fleming delivered to scant audiences at the Canadian Institute in 1850 are modest examples of the noble tradition of passionate amateurism in the sciences that fairly defined the intellectual climate of the first half of the nineteenth century. Natural science was an intellectual seducer, undertaught and unrewarded, feeding the speculative frontier. Jules Verne’s undersea and lunar adventures were not understood as pure fantasy. They, and Percival Lowell’s “discovery” of the canals on Mars, respected a prevailing popular attitude. Even into late century, many educated people assumed the connectedness of life on the surface of the earth with extraterrestrial civilizations, as well as with undersea and even so-far undiscovered life in temperate, subterrestrial pockets. The idea of a habitable solar system was a Victorian commonplace. (Following the “refutation” of the canals, it has taken another hundred years to restore a similar respectability to the idea of an inhabited universe. It’s the mark of our humanity. Many astronomers today project habitable zones, vast liquid oceans, on Jupiter’s moons.)

  Natural science in the era of “natural time,” before the revolutionary period of rationalization that began in the 1850s, attracted the wayward eccentrics, the mathematically gifted or the profoundly curious, from approved professions like theology, engineering, and medicine. Botany, geology, astronomy, archaeology, mythology, and linguistics were all enriched by a colorful assortment of autodidacts and hobbyists. Even the greatest among them, Charles Darwin, was self-taught, although the thirty years he spent contemplating the results of his youthful voyage to the Galápagos virtually created the condition of modern science, the hinge between the natural and the rational worlds, between amateur and professional science.

  Amateurism in its core sense—“for love”—had not yet deteriorated into dilettantism, as it would from the 1860s (thanks largely to the higher standards and demonstrated mastery of On the Origin of Species). Amateur scientists were often clerics, or sometimes barristers, who were both, after all, the most broadly educated members of their societies, for whom science and religion, or science and society, were obviously entwined. “Natural theology” was a comforting doctrine that did not conflict with the close scrutiny of nature, nor with the search for laws that governed its behavior. Nature was the face of God, and laws governing it were codices to God’s plan. To know nature was the most profound way of intuiting God. Theologians, like Fleming’s friend the Reverend George Grant, could devote six days of the week to the study of God’s handiwork and the seventh in writing a sermon to praise it.

  They kept journals, they sketched, mapped, and painted. On Fleming’s ocean-to-ocean survey of 1872, the party included not only its historian, George Grant, but an amateur naturalist—always the first to rise, to climb the cliffs, to investigate the damp rotten logs, to scrape the underside of tree bark for beetle grubs, and gather the prairie flowers. The party was often obliged to wait, not just for rain and blizzards and buffalo herds, but for the return of the naturalist from an unauthorized side trip.

  The “rambling” amateurs were prospectors of the new and interesting: flowers, fungi, insects, birds. They trained themselves to be accountable. In the decade of the 1850s especially, as we know from Thoreau and Dickens and Whitman, among many others, man’s relationship to nature was changing from one of reverence (and a certain amount of fear) to one of protection. With industrialism irreversible, nature took on an added value of nostalgia. Nature no longer ruled in Western culture, but the rules that governed it offered themselves as the source of all undiscovered knowledge. Like Fleming, that a priori thinker, or like Cleveland Abbe, who discarded a career in academic astronomy in order to become a meteorologist, the passionate amateurs, especially in the Anglo-American tradition, were often impatient with lab work and experimentation. Abbe begged his parents to desist from finding him a prestigious teaching post; he didn’t want to be stuck in a classroom, parroting lessons to restless boys. He wanted to be of practical use to humanity. They were capable of great anticipatory leaps that today would win no support from granting agencies. Their major ideas were already implanted; now they were looking for supporting evidence.

  Victorian geologists clustered around the hillside cuts of new railbeds, where they found evidence of ancient seas and fossils of marine creatures hundreds of miles from any modern, warm-water ocean. Coal seams revealed ancient marine habitats. Languages, living and dead, were linked on the basis of obscure syntactical similarities by linguistically trained missionaries and colonial officers. Minute fossil evidence established the chain of evolution. For every Charles Piazzi Smyth, the anti-meter zealot determined to force evidence into the mold of theory, there were dozens making their quiet contributions. The same issue of the Canadian Journal (the Institute’s publication) that contained Fleming’s Toronto Harbour maps and findings on its history and preservation boasts a lawyer’s notes on meteors, a minister’s
remarks on early Roman history, and another barrister’s comments on “new Genera and Species of Cystidea from the Trenton Limestone.” A Dr. Craigie and his son made an exhaustive list of indigenous plants found in the neighborhood of Hamilton, Ontario, and their dates of first flowering. (It would be interesting today, in light of global warming, to compare those dates of first flowering with current dates of flowering, if they can be established.)

  During the construction of the Intercolonial Railroad, from 1867 to 1872, Fleming had survived Parliamentary inquiries about extravagance (and possible collusion) for ordering iron bridges instead of wooden. Wooden bridges made financial (and “natural”) sense in the maritime forests, being infinitely faster and less expensive to build. He defended his choice on the rational basis of permanence and fire safety in that cinder-spewing age. Heavier bridge pilings, however, required deeper excavations and more careful soil analysis. Maritime river clays—and not Ontario sands—posed hazards to bridge pilings, in some cases signaling falsely that bedrock had been reached. In this case, unlike on the CPR, his engineering caution, and its attendant delays and expenses, were totally borne out. There was not yet a science, or a name, for some of the discoveries Fleming and other early engineers made, or for their ways of incorporating them in the daily railroad-building process.

  Fleming’s own “passionate amateurism” lasted well beyond the period of youthful enthusiasm. The transitional moment between natural and rational can be documented in the “science” of Sandford Fleming himself, from the far side of the time divide, before his involvement in theory. His mind knew the science, but his heart still fancied Jules Verne.

  In 1872 he gave a talk, titled simply “The Earth,” before the Mutual Improvement Society of Ottawa. It is a sober and responsible talk, reciting all the known facts of nineteenth-century geology, astronomy, and meteorology: distances, temperatures, compositions. He quotes the English mineralogist (and clergyman) Buckland: “Next to the study of the distant worlds which engages the contemplation of the astronomer, the largest and most sublime subject of physical inquiry which can occupy the mind of man and by far the most interesting from the personal concern we have in it, is the history of the formation and structure of the Planet on which we dwell.” Fair and graceful, and nothing, until late in the speech, would seem especially out of place even today.

  In the midst of citing Humboldt’s calculation of the earth’s interior temperatures, a molten core 160 times hotter than the melting point of iron, and observing that the only solid part of the planet was the crust upon which we floated, and that volcanoes were the vents of this “awful fire” and earthquakes were caused by this “eternal ebulition,” he suddenly breaks off from rational science into “natural” speculation. The line between a posteriori and a priori thinking, between objectivity and fanciful exuberance, was fine indeed, and continually wavering:

  This theory although supported by Humboldt and many philosophers of the present day, is at best a frightful one, and seems to be altogether contrary to reason. The conception of the boundary line betwixt the fluid masses of the interior and the outer crust of the earth, is most difficult for our powers of comprehension. How long could a sheet of paper exist on a cauldron of boiling iron, and yet the comparison is a just one: for the solid crust bears about the same proportion to the whole earth as a sheet of thick pasteboard does to a globe six feet in diameter.

  Can we imagine 160 millions of cubic miles of liquid fire beneath our feet, and yet the surface of our Planet remains tranquil, the seas and oceans cool, and our homes and ourselves undisturbed. Surely the interior of our globe must be made up of more peaceful materials.… [He then floats the proposition that the core of the earth is composed mostly of water, and finds “that theory more consistent and simple and more agreeable to the feelings of man.”]

  From the parallelism of the opposite shores of the Atlantic, it is highly probable that the continent at some distant period separated from the continent of Europe and Africa and floated gradually westward. Indeed it is not at all unlikely that the continent of which this province forms a part is still moving from our fatherland. The difference of longitude betwixt this country and Europe has never yet been accurately ascertained, at least the observations of Geographers and Astronomers vary at different times.… If we allow half that difference of longitude for error, we will find even at that slow rate, forty thousand years would be sufficient to waft America from the shores of the old world, to its present position.

  The action of volcanoes and earthquakes seems at first sight to be against the water theory, but then operations can be accounted for through the chemical agency of water and galvanic currents. With regard to this George Fairhold says, “We cannot consider the awful phenomena of burning mountains as more than superficial pustules on the mere skin of the earth.” It is now pretty generally understood and acknowledged that water is one of the most active agents in the production of volcanic fire; and that all the active volcanoes now known are situated near the sea coast, and rarely, or never, far in the interior depths of large continents. We have very great reason to conclude that the utmost depths of volcanic action are not greater than from one to five miles. Catpaxi, in South America, is perhaps of all volcanic mountains the most distant from the sea, and yet is only one hundred and forty miles from the shores of the Pacific. This volcano from time to time throws up not only great quantities of mud, but also innumerable fish.… According to Humboldt, most of the volcanoes of America throw out vast quantities of water and slime, at one of the volcanoes of Trinidad, a white sea shark was picked up in the act of being thrown out with the mud; sufficient proof of a subterraneous communication with the sea.

  It is fortunate for Fleming’s reputation that he confined himself to the social aspects of engineering and time theory, where his occasional a priori enthusiasms were less in conflict with the inflexible precision of hard science.

  Mathematical inferences had permitted the discovery of an unseen planet, Neptune, by Professor J. C. Adams of the Cambridge observatory, in 1845, plotted from the “perturbations” in the observed orbit of the remotest visible planet, Uranus. Spectroscopists studied fossil light from distant stars, establishing their chemical makeup, and that of the sun whenever eclipses provided the opportunity to photograph flares and the solar corona. Spectroscopy, in fact, became the most glamorous of Victorian sciences, as reflected in Whitman’s “Learn’d Astronomer,” earning for itself a special place in Huxley’s celebration of nineteenth-century advances. It was reason’s most abstract extrapolation.

  Solar eclipses became obligatory, if often far-flung, convention centers for the world’s astronomical elite to set up their lenses and cameras and wait for the perfect shot. The longest and most perfect eclipse of the nineteenth century, which occurred in the vicinity of Madras, India, in August 1869, attracted the world’s leading spectroscopists, like Jules-César Janssen of France and Lewis Rutherfurd of the United States. The rare event attracted directors of national observatories from all over Europe and Latin America. Their comfort was overseen by the head of the Indian Army, General Strachey (of the celebrated Anglo-Indian family), himself a notable naturalist. Fifteen years later, at the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, Janssen, Rutherfurd, and Strachey were delegates of their respective nations. Sandford Fleming would be present as a satellite British delegate, as would the plotter of Neptune, Professor Adams of Cambridge, and many of the world’s observatory directors.

  The chance to observe the 1869 eclipse was not confined to south India, of course. It also lured another future conference delegate, Cleveland Abbe, late of Russia, now the director of the Cincinnati observatory. Short on funds, he pitched his camp in the wilds of the Dakota Territory where he trained curious Sioux to help with the observations. The Indians, in turn, carved two commemorative sandstones with the date, “August,” and “1869,” which Abbe kept in Washington at the weather office the rest of his life. Those stones might symbolize the moment when t
he natural and rational worlds were briefly in balance. They might also signal the moment when native American science, starting from a deep deficit, had closed the gap with British.

  ANOTHER HINGE moment between natural and rational thought occurred in the early 1850s, when the telegraph came to outlying Scottish villages. Country folk appeared with their messages tightly rolled, imagining they’d be able to jam them, literally, through the copper wires. Fathers offered their “wee-est lads” as would-be telegraphers, speculating that they’d be selected on the basis of stature to slip more easily through the wires to deliver the messages. But how quick was their absorption of technology, how seamless the transition from natural to rational. Within the magical decade of the 1850s, those lads from the same hardscrabble Brigadoons were filling the new technical colleges, designing and running the steam engines of the world.

  Victorian England’s technical and economic supremacy is applicable only to a single decade, that of the 1850s, the decade of Prince Albert’s scientific leadership and the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, against a long stagnation and decline, with a growing sense of inadequacy, even of panic. Prince Albert himself had stated Britain’s preeminence succinctly, at the time of the exhibition: “Science discovers laws of power, motion, and transformation; industry applies them to the raw material.” Steam to railroads. Electricity to copper wire.

  Everywhere a Briton looked in the 1850s (except perhaps in the Crimea, or the Black Hole of Calcutta) he had seen reflections of British glory. Science and Industry. Empire and Progress. Charles Kingsley, one of the most influential of Victorian progressives, had written of his emerging generation in 1851: “The various stereotyped systems which they have received by tradition are breaking up under them like ice in a thaw, [and] a thousand facts and notions, which they know not how to classify, are pouring in on them like a flood.” Difficult scientific texts, like Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, were immediate best-sellers, and scientists communicated social ideas for the educated common reader through scientific prose, without compromise. Progressive thinkers regularly shared their ideas in workingmen’s halls.