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

by Clark Blaise

  It didn’t last. Just twenty-four years apart, two leading British scientists, both presidents of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, pronounced upon the state of British science. The difference in tone is telling. Sir William Fairbairn, in 1861, celebrated “the present epoch” as “one of the most important in the history of the world.” (In the same year, a distracted America was launching its Civil War, “Canada” was just an uneasy linkage of Ontario and Quebec, and Germany was an archipelago of princedoms.) “At no former period did science contribute so much to the uses of life and the wants of society,” Fairbairn said, then went on to quote Sir Francis Bacon, the founder of British science, for whom the “legitimate goal [of science] is the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches.” The words fairly burnish the image of a self-satisfied, even smug, British ascendancy. There is also a debatable point to raise: Are “inventions and riches” the goal of science?

  In 1885 Sir Lyon Playfair, reflecting on his long service to the crown and on the number of commissions of inquiry he’d chaired, contrasted British methods with those of the Americans (so robustly recovered from their Civil War) in assessing so mundane a subject as the decline of commercial fisheries:

  We go out and interview fishermen, who by their very nature know very little. They know the waters where they fish, they know the methods they’ve always employed, they know the raw tonnage of fish they expect to extract from the same grounds they’ve been using over several generations. The Americans, on the other hand, know that the fishermen are the worst possible source of information. America goes to its great pool of public universities, recruits the best men from every field, and consults the ocean itself, reads water-temperature, reads oxygen levels, studies predators, measures the size and condition of harvested species.

  Oxford and Cambridge had been disastrously slow to introduce science and engineering courses to their curricula. Civil-service exams for the Foreign Service through the 1880s weighed Greek and Latin results higher (six and eight hundred respectively) than scores in the natural sciences (five hundred for chemistry and three hundred for other physical sciences). The cult of the gentleman still held sway. In 1885 the twin prides of Britain’s ancient university system were judged not even the equal of second-rate German institutions. Science writers and popular philosophers such as Herbert Spencer harped on Darwin’s darker prophecies of the “devolution” of species, and the “degeneration” of nations. Questions were being raised about the fitness of modern man and modern society, and the failure of British institutions to meet the competitive challenge of younger and more vigorous nation-states, particularly Prussia and the United States.

  Nature still exerted a deep influence on Victorians, but it was a call that had to be tempered with reason. In particular, nature was only to be studied, not to be worshiped. Most of us have sampled the vast, cautionary literature of moral unraveling, in which reason and refinement “revert” to the state of nature (usually preceded by the adjective “raw”). The agents of degeneration, the dark legacy of Darwin’s hopeful evolution, were everywhere. Gypsies, shamans, medicine men, “half-breeds” and “octoroons,” Hindus, Catholics, Muslims, the miscegenist, the scholar who identified too strongly with his subject and “went native,” becoming … a monster, a Kurtz, a madman. In the tropics we must always dress for dinner, maintain a steely distance from the natives, avoid dangerous spices, and keep our linens starched. The natives are children—appealing, sometimes clever, often mischievous, eternally in need of models and a stern rebuke. A stiff peg in the evening, preferably with quinine, will see us through.

  After 1860 the contributions of the amateur, the “rambling” naturalist, began to fade. Cultured dilettantism showed its inadequacy, especially in the face of a technically proficient Prussia and an ever-curious, expansive United States. A genial agnosticism took root across Victorian middle-class society. Religion was a social duty, a weekly reach toward the sublime—rather like Fleming’s “Earth” speech—but otherwise discouraged in the Victorian hurly-burly. This is not to suggest, however, that religious attendance or its attendant social pieties disappeared. Scientists still proclaimed their faith. Fleming, a faithful Scottish Presbyterian, rewrote his faith’s prayer book to accommodate worshipers in isolated Scottish settlements in the western provinces, often hundreds of miles from an organized church and ordained minister.

  Outward observation, all those Sunday sermons at sea, or in jungle clearings, remained a significant part of Victorian life, as of course were missions to the heathens on every continent. Sermons were crafted documents, listened to and judged not on their emotional content, but on their intellectual and moral merit. In the seventy years of Fleming diaries, no more than half a dozen missed Sunday services are recorded, and always with remorse and a good excuse. The fervor of old-time religion, the emotional faith, was forced underground.

  Victorians wanted to know about the earth, the plants and animals, the nature of the sun and stars, the atom, and the human body, and they saw all of nature as part of a unified system. They believed in a knowable universe and the unification of all knowledge. Thomas H. Huxley, in his 1887 essay, “The Progress of Science,” a review of science during Victoria’s first fifty years, predicted the imminent announcement of a unified theory that would combine not only light, gravity, and magnetism, but also biology, linguistics, and religion. Under Victoria, he wrote, science had discovered the three touchstones of nature: the molecular theory of matter, the conservation of energy, and evolution. Those three principles were sufficient to anticipate more wonders to come. He defended the approaches of induction and deduction, wild guesses and speculations—“anticipations of nature,” he called them—in a wondrous adaptation of time all his own.

  Huxley’s expectation of an imminent explanation was almost met. Eighteen years after his essay, Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905) did grow from specialized concerns to have profound effects on philosophy and the arts, just as Darwin’s had had thirty-five years before. What Huxley did not foresee—and this divides the Victorian from the modern world, the natural from the rational—was the resistance to reason. The first of The Fundamentals, the source of all twentieth-century biblical literalism, had already been published in 1902. This was a series of pamphlets, which appeared under the imprimatur of the American Bible League, which attacked humanism, socialism, feminism, and evolution, and promoted a new view of biblical inerrancy.

  It was not just pride in the sheer accumulation of scientific knowledge that concerned the Victorians; they also demanded that it have practical application and social benefit. After meticulously listing and crediting the great minds of England and the Continent who had brought so much fundamental scientific knowledge to mankind since the Renaissance, Huxley proceeds to list their failings:

  … but weaving and spinning were carried on with the old appliances; nobody could travel faster by sea or by land than at any previous time in the world’s history, and King George could send a message from London to York no faster than King John might have done. Metals were worked from their ores by immemorial rule of thumb, and the centre of the iron trade in these islands was still among the oak forests of Sussex. The utmost skill of our mechanicians did not get beyond the production of a coarse watch.

  The Victorian mantra is simple and ringing: Be of practical use to society, serve mankind. What good is theory if it does not improve the lives of common man? This is England’s great departure from the Continental tradition of theory and pure research. It is also an expression of the choice that was facing the United States after the Civil War—adopt the British or German model of higher education?—and it is evident in the thinking of everyone associated with the standard-time movement. Research is fine, ran the popular interpretation; just don’t lose touch with reality. “The later Victorians as a group were men and women of remarkable moral resolution,” writes Richard Altick. “Living in a wasteland strewn with blasted articles of faith, th
ey carried on, with spirit and confidence. What they lost in intellectual assurance and emotional comfort, they compensated for in sheer strength of will.”

  Around 1870 the British technical advantage of mid-century stalled. Part of it was the inevitable result of competition with Germany, France, and the United States, but Britain blunted its own growth by failing to increase its investment in technical and scientific education. The emphasis on social utility, the historic scorn for theory and basic research, cost Britain dearly. Sir Lyon Playfair noted that a single German university, for example Strasbourg or Leipzig, received ten thousand pounds more in direct state aid than the half-dozen colleges and universities of Scotland and Ireland together. Holland, with only four million people and four universities—the same in both regards as Scotland—out-spent Scotland nearly fivefold. France, in her determined rebuilding after the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, had asked herself a question that Britain would not raise for another halfcentury: Why could superior men not be found in France at the moment of her peril? One obvious answer was that in 1868, the Sorbonne had received the equivalent of £8,000 in state aid for academic use. By 1885 that amount had climbed to over £3 million. The implications are clear: Britain had retreated into its historic insularity. The rallying voice of Prince Albert had long been stilled. France and Germany had acted on Albert’s assertion that science and research are the source of wealth, power, and progress.

  OF COURSE Victorians were not modernists. They could not know that their own proudest inventions—sociology and psychology as obvious examples—would contribute to the undermining of Victorian confidence. What did those new “social” sciences prove but that man behaved irrationally, and that one of the vaunted Victorian articles of faith, “character,” derived as much from secret drives, repressions, or unconscious influences as from sturdy moral and social exempla? After the standardtime issues had been settled, Fleming spent the next twenty years perfecting a world-circling undersea cable that would link England instantaneously with all her distant colonies. He believed (and how could he not?) that intimate and immediate contact would spawn greater knowledge, loyalty, and affection between the mother of parliaments and her satellites. The better we know our government, the deeper our respect. How could they have guessed that loyalty and affection were better guaranteed by the mystique of remoteness, that intimacy was the surest guarantor of mutual contempt?

  Their children became avid appreciators of all that the Victorians had dismissed as natural, or primitive. Hermann Hesse, Pablo Picasso, E. M. Forster, Romain Rolland, D. H. Lawrence, Igor Stravinsky, painters, dancers, and composers, tried to restore the balance between nature and reason and to inject, or even inflate, the primitive elements in their work. But by then it was too late. The “real” Italy, Tahiti, Mexico, and India had been tamed, even Christianized. Their mythic, sexual, and Tantric “natural” identities had been driven, Forster-style, into caves, or into the hearts of various darknesses. However faintly, however ghostly those longitudinal and time-zone borders were drawn, north and south, colonizer and colonial were pinned to the same grid, stuck in the same time. The natural world had been banished, except through the occasional sexual encounter with the Greco-Roman or Indo-Aryan ideal, or sentimentalized, or Romanticized, as in the case of Lawrence of Arabia.

  The application of dispassionate reason to unruly nature created modern science and the methodology that still sustains it. Sherlock Holmes’s famous magnifying lens can stand for all the microscopes and telescopes, the patient accumulation of “trifles” and the inexhaustible permanence of clues in the natural world still waiting to be discovered—and fashioned into stunning, all-encompassing revelation. Those methods of inquiry had created the Industrial Age and the technological revolution, they built the communications networks, they asked the questions that led to the discovery of bacteria, radiation, spectroscopy, natural selection, that spawned the fields of earth science, philology, physics, chemistry, sociology, and psychology. Call him Holmes, or Darwin, or Freud, or Whitman—or in the context of this book, Abbe, Allen, Barnard, Dowd, Fleming, Herschel, Janssen, Strachey, Struve—any of that largely self-taught Victorian band and their European and North American equivalents who applied the abstract to the practical, and the practical to the abstract, induction and deduction, to come up with a new way of organizing time.

  Standard time is the biggest gauge in the world. It converts celestial motion to civic time. And the most important fact about Sandford Fleming is that he realized it first and brought it to the attention of the rest of the world. That the world would finally opt for a simpler configuration in no way negates his message.

  IN 1870s Ottawa, where the social tone was set by the British-appointed governors-general, Fleming ranked first among equals. Sandra Gwyn in her history of early Ottawa social life, The Private Capital, describes Fleming as sui generis, topping the A-list of every ambitious hostess. He was everything the Victorian gentleman should be. In the city, charming, sophisticated, commanding, at ease in all circles, political or diplomatic. Camped in the extremes of the Canadian summers and winters, leading survey crews over the swamps and mountains, he reveled in hardship.

  And yet, two years after his return to Canada from his sabbatical in 1878, he was relieved of his CPR commission. For a period of about three years, from 1878 until he righted himself in 1881, he exhausted the tide of good luck that had floated him from relatively uneducated, penniless immigrant to the number-one civilian in Canadian society. In the dark year of 1880, Fleming was reduced to begging Parliament for a fair settlement, citing his double commission on the two railroads, the workload he had carried, his broken health. In all his letters, only that of February 9, 1880, after his fate had been decided, can be called self-pitying:

  I indeed felt the weight of the responsibilities that were thrown upon me and I labored night and day in a manner which will never be known, some time after I began to work double times. I had the misfortunate in two consecutive years, 1872 and 1873, to meet with serious accidents. By the first I came near to terminating my life, by the second I was placed on crutches for 6 or 7 months. During the whole of these periods except when actually confined to bed I never ceased to carry on my work which I need not say was at times very arduous. As a consequence my general health suffered and I was forced to seek for some respite.

  It earned him a severance package (as we’d say today) made up of what he might have made as Chief Engineer of the CPR, alone, minus the salary he’d already received for his years on the Intercolonial, times his eight years in service. In the Gilded Age, when the golden goose took the form of the iron horse, Fleming was cut loose for $29,800.

  The railroad was reconfigured as a private corporation under the direction of the Chicago-born William Cornelius Van Horne. Thus it was an American who saved Canada from American designs. (And the most designing “American” of all was the Canadian-born James J. Hill, head of the Minnesota-based Great Northern, who recommended Van Horne in the first place.) Under Van Horne, the intractable choices between northern and southern routes through the Rocky Mountains were resolved. Van Horne was efficient, which is to say in that era, sufficiently ruthless and brilliant to proceed rapidly. He also benefited from the principal lesson Parliament had learned from Fleming: that an undertaking the size of the CPR had to be privatized and insulated from political oversight. Thus even Fleming’s greatest failure provided useful instruction. Note, incidentally, that when a second cross-country route, that of the Canadian National Railway, was extended to the Pacific, it followed Fleming’s survey-route through Yellowhead Pass.

  It was at the beginning of this dismal period that his time paper was rejected in Dublin. And then, his good fortune returned. George Grant wrangled a largely honorary appointment for him as chancellor of a Scottish-Presbyterian institution, Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario. The job required his appearance on campus for no more than five days a year. He proved himself an exceptional fund-raiser, especi
ally through his friend and fellow Fifer, Andrew Carnegie. He accepted directorships from the CPR and the Hudson’s Bay Company. The rest of his life, for the next thirty-five years, was devoted to travel, writing, and lectures.

  Fleming’s harshest critic is Canada’s popular historian Pierre Berton, whose National Dream: The Great Railway 1871–1881, is the most readable account of the political and financial intrigue that swirled around the building of the railway. Of Fleming’s failure he wrote:

  When the Royal Commission finally made its report it came down very hard on the former engineer-in-chief but by then the construction of the railway was proceeding apace. Fleming went off to the International Geographical Congress in Venice to ride in gondolas and deliver a paper entitled “The Adoption of a Prime Meridian.” Greater glories followed. His biography, when it was published, did not mention the petty jealousies, the bursts of temperament, the political jockeying, the caution, the waste and the near anarchy that were commonplace in the engineering offices of the public works department under his rule. He survived it all and strode into the history books without a scar. The story of his term as Engineer-in-Chief is tangled and confused, neither black nor white, since it involved neither villains nor saints but a hastily recruited group of very human and often brilliant men faced with superhuman problems, not the least of which was the spectre of the Unknown, and subjected to more than ordinary tensions including the insistent tug of their own ambitions.

  I will return to Berton’s charges a little later, but observe here only that Berton, at his narrowest, is correct in his charges. Fleming’s term of office on the CPR was a failure, and part of the responsibility for failure surely rests with him.