Time Lord

by Clark Blaise

  Our sense of a decent civil society depends on the rule of law, but just laws, in turn, derive from what Landes called “shared time,” the democratic apportionment of time. Wages, contracts and patents, terms of office and weighted sentences, permissions, warrants lapsing and renewing, rents, interest, schedules, penalties, bonds maturing and loans falling due—in all this, civil society recognizes the beneficial impermanence of political and economic activity. But not total impermanence. It seeks to preserve other institutions, and to render them time-resistant, as in the case of life appointments, of tenure, of tax-free status for churches, schools, museums, and certain kinds of foundations. Democracy recognizes individual change as part of a greater continuity; change guarantees stability. Tyrannies shelter their institutions with permanence and resist all change as a threat to their legitimacy.

  If time did not come directly from God, it came from the tsar, and later from the Communist Party. Young Cleveland Abbe, one of the major players in the standard time movement, friend and collaborator of Fleming’s, president of the American Metrological (measure-reform, not weather-forecasting) Society, and founder of the U.S. Weather Service, spent two postdoctoral years (1866–67) in Russia working under Otto Struve, director of the Pulkovo observatory near St. Petersburg. During those years, he had to instruct his mother to stop addressing her letters to him at “the National Observatory,” because, he explained, Russians had no concept of “national” apart from their language. Everything else was owned, named after, or donated by the tsar, like an indulgent father to his children. He was working in the tsar’s observatory, under the direction of the tsar’s astronomer. To the very progressive-minded Abbe, the tsar’s authority had infantilized his people, turning their protests into futile acts of petty vandalism, their celebrations into drunken brawls, their marriages into loveless quarrels.

  While there, Abbe fell in love with Struve’s youngest half sister, Ämalie, and planned to marry her, and even to stay in Russia, or take her back to her native Germany. But he had not taken into account another aspect of time, the full weight of German conservatism. His formal request for Ämalie’s hand was rejected by Otto. It was her duty as youngest daughter, he dictated, to look after her stepmother; and that is precisely what she did, right up to the years preceding the First World War. If they had married, and if Abbe had stayed in Europe and headed a European observatory, standard time assuredly would not have evolved as it did.

  Following the rejection, he left Russia within weeks and eventually, after a few years heading the Cincinnati Observatory, reshaped his very productive life from academic astronomy to weather forecasting. In his Cincinnati years he, too, published standard-time proposals for reforming North American time-reckoning, featuring time zones and a Greenwich prime. It was as a weatherman, however, not a railroad executive, that the need for standardization pressed most heavily on him. In his Washington office, he received hourly weather bulletins telegraphed from dozens of reporting stations, hundreds and even thousands of miles away. They all had to be translated into a single isotemp, “real time,” in order to predict the direction and magnitude of storm fronts, then plotted on his maps of isobars and isotherms (dreamy, elliptical, transitory lines, so different from the inflexible bars of longitude) and then resubmitted to, or retranslated in different local times for, subscribers in hundreds of daily newspapers.

  Nearly twenty years after his great Russian adventure, Cleveland Abbe was reunited in Washington, as one of four American delegates to the 1884 Prime Meridian Conference, with Ämalie’s half brother, Charles de Struve, the Russian ambassador to the United States and chief Russian delegate to the conference. The elective affinities of the world’s intellectual elites were no less on display in the 1880s than they are today.

  MY PARTICULAR family history is hardly exceptional among immigrant groups, especially considering that my parents were the least exotic of all foreigners in the United States: Canadians. It’s rather like a Scotsman claiming immigrant status in England. Nevertheless, the silence that exists between familiars, or nations, often bears close attention.

  My paternal grandfather, Achille Blais, was born to tenant farmers in 1865, the son of two hundred years of tenant farmers, in the Beauce region south of Quebec City. When he was nineteen, in 1884 (the year, coincidentally, of the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington), he left the land and became a day laborer (journalier) for a dollar a day in the sawmills of a newly established village named Lac-Mégantic. He knew wood; he built furniture, he was a carpenter. His eighteenth child, my father, Léo Roméo, was born in Lac-Mégantic in 1905. My eighteen aunts and uncles, only five of whom lived past the age of seven, were named with an eye to eternity: Homer, Ovid, Hector, Ulysses, Iphygenia, Athena … down to the two youngest, Roméo and Rolland.

  It broke my heart, a few years ago, researching the parish records of old Lac-Mégantic for an earlier book. Baby Ulysse Blais, dead at three years, six months. Baby Athénée, dead at two. They were all victims of the “natural” world of diseases borne in the animal and human putrescence that pooled in the stagnant water (kept artificially flooded by the lumber mill in order to float their logs). My grandparents serenely buried them and carried on. Eighty-five percent of their children, as Faulkner put it, “manured the earth.” Two or three times a year, my grandfather affixed his “X” in the parish birth and death records, just above the priest who was the lone literate in the village. This is the way it had always been, and the way it would have stayed, in a natural world. Something in Achille, however, made it change. Time was in the air. Perhaps time had something to do with it.

  He walked over the border, only ten miles away, and hopped a train to Lewiston, Maine. He worked in a shoe factory, and brought his family over. Nothing vastly heroic like Sandford Fleming’s sailing the ocean and bringing his parents over in just three years—Lewiston being just seventy-five miles away—but the social change was arguably more profound. A few years later, they moved on to the Mecca of all French-Canadians, Manchester, New Hampshire, where the five surviving children found work in the spinning mills. No schooling, of course. In his lifetime my grandfather passed from “Achilles,” a classical god, to the name of his obituary notice in New Hampshire, “Archie,” a comic-book hero, an immigrant fate. But by the time he died he was a contractor and home builder.

  In his seventy years he recapitulated not only the history of his people and their economic evolution—serf to entrepreneur—but the history of time itself. Grandfather, born into illiteracy, brutal mortality and a medieval Catholic world, entered history despite lifelong illiteracy because time, in the course of his lifetime, lost its godly authority. That dollar a day as a day laborer in Lac-Mégantic, as humble a time contract as can be imagined, led my father to a succession of marriages (at least one of them, to an anglaise, lasted for about fifteen years)—to Florida and to Pittsburgh, more marriages, and back to Manchester, where his life ran out. In two generations from tenant farming to house building, to my father’s prizefighting, lounge singing, liquor running, and finally, furniture selling. I was freed for college, marriage to an Indian woman, and this life outside of time altogether, a “temporal millionaire,” in the words of the social psychologist Robert Levine in The Geography of Time: someone, as he describes it, always ready for a movie in the afternoon or six months in another country.

  ANY ADULT alive in the 1870s and eighties, that generation of time-makers, could remember a childhood when nothing he now took for granted was in existence, or even contemplated—electric lights, the telegraph and telephone, photography, refrigeration, typewriters, the train, the steam liner, theories of evolution, the molecular theory of matter and the conservation of energy. So much change in so little time; we can’t imagine the excitement and the anxiety Victorians felt. There were suddenly no borders, no “natural” limits. Regimes that depended on containment for self-perpetuation, like the Ottomans or the Romanovs, found themselves outflanked in every possible way.

&
nbsp; The outermost rings of time reform include the lifespans of the major figures in the movement. When Abbe and Fleming started school in the 1830s, steam locomotion barely existed, but feudalism did, and the last Romantics were still alive. They grew up with the inventions of the electric cable and the expansion of the railroad grid, they absorbed the lessons of Darwin, and lived through the daily wonders of Victorian science and technology. They watched gasoline replace coal, electricity replace steam. Most lived to see the first flight and motion pictures and to listen to wireless transmissions. They believed they had seen the end of human want and misery, and that the cycles of natural calamity had been broken by the application of reason. They believed passionately in international cooperation, and they had the model of the Prime Meridian Conference to celebrate. They died reading reports from the battlefields of World War I.

  Fleming bridges two worlds. He was born in 1827, the year Samuel Taylor Coleridge died. When he emigrated to Canada in 1845, there were only fourteen miles of railroad in the entire country. He built thousands more. He died there seventy years later, at his daughter’s home in Halifax, on a day in 1915 when Commonwealth troops were being slaughtered at Gallipoli, in the year of Frank Sinatra’s birth.

  3

  What Times Is It?

  He and his eighteenth-century, troglodytic Boston were suddenly cut apart—separated forever—in act if not in sentiment, by the opening of the Boston and Albany Railroad; the appearance of the first Cunard steamers in the bay, and the telegraphic messages which carried from Baltimore to Washington the news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were nominated for the Presidency. This was in May, 1844; he was six years old; his new world was ready for use, and only fragments of the old met his eyes.

  —HENRY ADAMS, The Education of Henry Adams

  BEFORE THE WORLD was divided into twenty-four time zones, and before each day began at midnight on the Greenwich prime meridian, and before the international date line kept the calendar in balance, every settlement with a need to know the time kept its own official clock. Time was based on the solar noon, that shadowless, sundial moment when the sun appears to stand directly overhead. But the sun keeps moving (or more properly, the earth keeps revolving), twelve and a half miles a minute, along the most populated latitude in North America. Imagine towns like knots tied on an infinite string; every twelve and a half miles signaled a new solar minute. Every eleven hundred feet, to be even more maddeningly precise, created a new solar second. Put in today’s terms, every town was its own Greenwich. Adjacent villages clung jealously to their particular time with all the ferocity of a threatened identity, accusing others of keeping false time.

  From the setting of an accurate local solar noon, public clocks and personal pocket watches could easily plot the precise time, and a “time-ball”—whose direct descendant is saluted each New Year’s Eve in Times Square—could be dropped from the tallest steeple, or bells might be set off in the firehouse, or a cannon fired in the harbor. The time was accurate, it was indisputably twelve o’clock noon, but—and here is the great dilemma that faced the world until the 1884 Prime Meridian Conference—it was only noon for that community, inside those twelve miles.

  All across the continent, every twelve miles-plus along the same east-west latitude—New York to San Francisco, let us say—as the sun crossed new longitudinal meridians, new noons were created, new time-balls were lowered, new bells went off. Out in the Delaware Valley, sixty miles west of New York City, it was just 11:55 A.M. when the whistles were blowing in lower Manhattan. In fact, when the time-ball was falling in Manhattan, it was only 11:59 A.M. in Newark, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River.

  So long as people remained in their towns and villages, or on their farms, and so long as sailing boats, riverboats, barges and horses, or oxcarts provided the means of transport, competing time standards really didn’t matter. No one could go far enough or fast enough in a day, let alone in an hour, to run into confusion. Then, as now, people wanted the assurance of precision, but they were not in the habit of looking beyond their own horizon. As “magnetic” (electric) technology evolved during the nineteenth century, it became possible for telegraphy to provide exact time signals from the nearest observatory, directly to the time-ball. The first such “magnetically signaled” time-ball was installed in Toronto in 1842. In 1868, at the Naval Observatory in Washington, the instant signal was coupled to an electric motor, which permitted the automatic dropping of a precisely accurate time-ball. Automatic signaling was an advance in convenience, but it did not address the basic problem. There were still too many different times. Had railroads and the telegraph—in other words, speed—not disrupted the system of local time notation, rendering the sun too slow a metronome, the temporal revolution might well have been delayed until the next revolution, the spreading electrical power grid, demanded it.

  (Not to race too far ahead, but it is instructive, I think, to consider a temporal dilemma we will be facing in the near future. The Internet and its related technologies are establishing a new time consciousness even while we observe nineteenth-century railroad time as our official standard. The debates of the nineteenth century have shown us that society, and maybe even the human psyche, do not easily adapt to competing time standards. I doubt that the twenty-first century will be any more successful.)

  ESSENTIALLY, ANY official adherence to the solar noon involves two distinct and unavoidable flaws. One derives from the earth’s rotation, the other from its tilt. The rotation, as we’ve already seen, spawns countless noons, and therefore countless midnights. The circumference of the earth, twenty-four thousand miles, contains nearly two thousand solar minutes and a theoretical infinity of legal “solar days” based on the mad precision of the solar minute and the solar second. New York’s “day” started and ended five minutes before Philadelphia’s, a minute before Newark’s, twelve minutes after Boston’s … and so on. Ninth Avenue in New York is a fraction of a second “faster” than its westerly neighbor Tenth Avenue; they could each claim a separate day. Where does it end? If the Oakland Bay Bridge had been built in the nineteenth century, the Oakland end would have been thirty seconds “faster” than San Francisco’s. At least, the earth’s rotation is steady and predictable, and if one is prepared to live with the infuriating multiplicity it demands, it is calculable.

  The earth’s tilt, however, introduces a wild card. Unless one lives on the equator, each day’s noon falls a few seconds or minutes earlier or later than the noon of the previous day. The sun rises or sets at a different minute each day. (The more northerly position of Europe exacerbates the daily differences even more dramatically.) In a world run on natural rhythms, regulated by priests or other appointed or hereditary interpreters, solar irregularities are merely the visible face of God. Sunrise (for Hindus) and sunset (for Jews and Muslims), rather than the West’s civil midnight, whenever they occur, mark the beginning of the natural or religious day. Only in a world of contracts, wages, and schedules are natural variables taken as irritants. At whose midnight, for example—yours or the company headquarters’—might an insurance policy run out, or a new law take effect? A birth or a death occurring near midnight on the last day of a month, or year, might officially occur (that is, be entered on a registry) on a different day, month, or year wherever such records were kept, a few miles east or west of the original event.

  Versions of the sundial method of time-reckoning had served the Greeks, the Romans, the Jews, the Arabs, and doubtless the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Chinese, and the Druids—at least on cloudless days—but their methods, however ingenious, could not satisfy the needs for both precision and predictability that technologically sophisticated Europeans and Americans came to demand. In other words, nature’s time is fine for religious observation, but it’s a rotten way to run a railroad. And running the railroad, as the rail systems expanded and nineteenth-century commerce grew increasingly dependent upon them, is what standard time was all about.

  The true probl
em with ancient methods of timekeeping was not only the inevitable meteorological and seasonal complications, but the fact that a multiplicity of so-called local times meant that none of them could be readily converted. Town A could not know the times in Towns B, C, and D, but this inability had not been a problem until rapid travel between settlements became common, practical, and comfortable. Solar time converts nothing; it cannot function as a gauge. Having too many times, the traveling public was discovering, was worse than having no time at all. Official times multiplied like weeds, and nature offered only a nightmare of endless proliferation. At mid-century, there were 144 official times in North America. And no one, apparently, was there to rationalize it.

  SANDFORD FLEMING, in an 1890 essay, “Our Old-Fogy Methods of Reckoning Time,” a retrospective history of the standard-time movement and the struggle for its acceptance, would have taken strong exception to a term I’ve been using rather loosely—“local time.” He found the very idea objectionable, in that it encouraged the common misconception that there were, indeed, many times. When I use that convenient but imprecise phrase, please be mindful of the following caveat: