by Clark Blaise
His intervention was not warmly received. The French chose to see it as coming close to a parody of the classic split between two philosophical traditions: the sleek, rationalist vessel of polished discours rammed by the rusty coal barge of British empiricism. Finally, out of frustration, anger, and self-pity, the French gave up and called for a vote on the neutral meridian, which was defeated, 21–3. Fleming’s compromise, had the French accepted it, was logical, even virtuous. The anti-prime retains all the charts of Greenwich, but removes from them the taint of a British connection. But the French refused to accept the argument; they saw the anti-prime as still infected by the English contaminant. The atmosphere had grown poisonous, and the British-American axis had been encouraged by the final vote, to adopt a triumphalist pose. Rutherfurd immediately renewed his Greenwich motion, Fleming amended it to leave room for his own anti-prime—to call it the “great circle” of Greenwich—but the British delegates, Evans, Strachey, and Adams, revolted against their Canadian member, announcing that they renounced Fleming’s position. Fleming’s amendment lost, and the rest is part of our common history. Even his later time-zone recommendations were ruled out of order. The French, and Fleming, lost.
And while he was at it, Rutherfurd exposed one rather obvious flaw in Fleming’s carefully worked-out proposal. He pointed out that a Pacific prime would have disastrous effects on London, and Western Europe in general. If the anti-prime became the prime, Greenwich would become the anti-prime. At noon every day, England would be split into separate days. Clearly it was preferable to change the world date in the unpopulated Pacific than in the middle of the largest city in the world.
Greenwich passed. The world day, the counting of time zones, the astronomer’s day, all civil time for all societies begins at midnight on the Greenwich meridian. Fleming’s anti-prime disappeared, only to be resurrected at a later date as the international date line. It was left to the Russian ambassador (and amateur astronomer), Charles de Struve, to clean up computational anomalies left in the wake of the Greenwich selection. First of all, he proposed the rescinding of the Rome accord on the universal day (one of the last Fleming initiatives still standing). The universal day should begin at the Greenwich midnight, not noon, for the avoidance of double-counting the dates in Europe and North America. The Russian deserves credit for the east-west division of longitudes, 180 degrees east and west from the zero meridian, also an overturning of a Fleming-supported Rome agreement. Otherwise, Greenwich would have been in the anomalous position of lying, simultaneously, on the zero and the 360th degree of longitude. Villages a few miles west of Greenwich would carry unwieldy coordinates like 359 degrees west longitude, while neighboring towns a few miles east might lie at two degrees.
To de Struve also goes the credit for unifying the astronomer’s day with the civil day (“We think it easier for the astronomers to change the starting point, and to make allowance for the twelve hours of difference in their calculations, than it would be for the public and for the business men, if the date for the universal time began at noon, and not at midnight”) and, perhaps most significantly, for the creation of the all-important international date line (“the change of the day of the week, historically established on or about the anti-meridian of Greenwich, should henceforth take place exactly on that meridian”). He supported the adoption of the universal day (clause five of the Rome Conference), “side by side with the local time, for international telegraphic correspondence, and for through international lines by railroads and steamers.” And he warmly supported Fleming’s beloved twenty-four-hour clock. And so Sandford Fleming’s great adventure had come full circle.
And why, I ask myself, did Fleming, and the French, lose so profoundly? In Rome, an understanding had been struck that England and America would give serious thought to adopting the metric system (it is still the legal standard in both countries, and was nearly enacted in the United States in the last century) in return for French acquiescence to Greenwich. That hope, along with the support shown in Rome for the anti-prime, certainly motivated French participation in the Washington Conference.
But why did Fleming fail to see the flaws in his position? Blinded by vanity and ambition? Overmatched, finally, by the world’s scientific and diplomatic elites? I think not. The French (and Fleming) were correct to insist on a “scientifically” derived prime. Science says only that all meridians are equal, and if the maritime tonnage alone is to settle the issue, then the conference need not to have been called in the first place. The French (and Fleming) were also correct to downplay the need for a first-class observatory on that prime, and correct to show faith in the accuracy of modern telegraphy. But the French were even more committed to scientific neutrality than Fleming; he, after all, was a secret partisan of preserving Greenwich charts for his anti-prime proposal.
It was politics that had given momentum to the concept of convenience. The indelicate French response, that the proud traditions of ten nations were to be sacrificed to the size of another meridian’s clientele, points out a serious flaw. If convenience and popularity were the only standards that matter, then science had been replaced by political power, and by commercial mandate. For many reasons, the Prime Meridian Conference can be seen as one of the first “modern” moments in science.
The fact is, the Washington conference was a diplomatic meeting, and Fleming had no country, no support, no constituency, and no rapport with his fellow British delegates, who were dedicated, above all, to the selection of the Greenwich meridian. There had never been a single date-line meridian as there had been various primes; the Portuguese had marked Macao as their date line, the Spanish chose Manila, the Dutch, Batavia. Just as prime meridians had proliferated over the centuries, so had date lines. The exact link between the prime and its precise half-global anti-prime—the date line—had not been set until Charles de Struve articulated it. Fleming might be forgiven for concentrating on his Pacific prime, and neglecting the implications for a precise European date change. We might even see a time, in the not-distant future, when the change-of-date between North America and Asia is considered far more disruptive of commerce than would be a similar a separation from Europe. Splitting London (or even continental Europe) into different calendar dates is obviously unworkable, but Fleming and his allies, including such prominent geographers as Frederick Barnard, were committed to the system of “cosmic” time, a “world-day.” Fleming in particular saw time as a continuous flow. Date-lines were an impediment, and their exact location could be negotiated. Ferro Island, in the Azores, had at one time served as the prime meridian; perhaps it could serve again as a date-line.
Naval astronomers acting on instructions from their national governments took the initiative in Washington. In Rome twelve of the thirty-eight delegates had been academics, directors of their national observatories, thus a little more independent of diplomatic concerns. In many ways the naval astronomers were the perfect technocrats for the job. They were informed, practical, and aggressive. They saw no virtue in the appeasement of sentimentality, they pressed their advantages and were indifferent to the diplomatic “susceptibilities.” And that, I feel, was the major miscalculation of Sandford Fleming—his fear of arousing those sensibilities, and overestimating, perhaps, the persuasive (or disruptive) powers of the French, and the effect they might have on the necessary unanimity that standard time for the world required.
Men like Fleming, who had been so influential at Rome and Venice, had no role to play, except as foils, in Washington. Fleming ended up patronized by the British, ignored by the Americans, and held in contempt by the French. William F. Allen, a fellow engineer from the world of railroads, the man who had transformed time in North America and been hailed a scientific genius in the American press just six months earlier, spoke up only once during the entire three-week conference, to no practical effect. The major result of the Washington Conference, the fixing of Greenwich, was not scientifically or diplomatically settled. It was a popular vote. The arbitrar
y conditions of nineteenth-century commerce have, however, defined time for over a century. Fleming returned to Ottawa without a comment in his journal, except to note that he had seven dollars in his pocket.
NOW, AT THE TURN of the millennium, Abbe’s arguments on the impossibility of separating a definition from the definer, or neutrality from self-interest, objectivity from cultural bias, seem to evoke the unsteady first steps of that demon-in-waiting, the uncertainty principle. And in Fleming’s appeal for the universal day, cosmic time, and the anti-prime—“as speed increases, time appears to shrink, and space to expand”—the modern ear detects the distant rustle of relativity. The last year in human history with too many times, but no place for starting and ending them, was over. A great hinge had creaked shut and the world had been fundamentally altered. Sundial time was banished, a sophisticated abstraction had taken its place. Not a penny was spent, not a drop of blood spilled.
And who were the winners in Washington? At first glance, Britain and the Anglo-Saxon world, of course. But did France, or Fleming, retreat in tatters? Hardly. History has enshrined Fleming and rendered the names of de Struve, Rutherfurd, Adams, Sampson and the rest to honorable obscurity. He went on to enjoy the undeniable and wholly deserved credit for the trans-Pacific cable.
France abstained from voting throughout and true to Lefaivre’s promise, “Greenwich” never appeared on any French chart. In 1898 official French time was defined as “Paris mean time, retarded by nine minutes, twenty-one seconds.” Oddly enough, the “retarded” French time was thus identical to that of a certain leafy London suburb. But obstinacy has its triumphs, and complacency its defeats. Janssen was correct. The electric telegraph could indeed have replaced a full-blown modern observatory; some outpost on Diomede Island in the Bering Strait could have served as the prime. France had taken the lead in scientific telegraphy and is today the home of Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), which has replaced GMT almost everywhere. The difference is less than a second per day; UTC enfolds the leap-second phenomenon within it, to compensate for the earth’s decelerating rotation. The only country still using Greenwich time is Britain.
A HUNDRED and fifteen years after the agreements on standard time, familiar conditions are reappearing. I’ve called them “a-temporal” manifestations, but they’re also commonly gathered under the rubric “the digital divide.” To enumerate: cell phones, jet travel, e-mail, DNA analysis, computer-speed communication, storage, and retrieval—they all transcend the normal fixed-time, fixed-space concepts of the time-space continuum. Crimes committed decades ago and thousands of miles away can be solved. Phone calls can be made or received independent of a fixed location of sending or receiving. In Iowa, I have sat in the cab of a tractor and watched weather maps from Argentina, Australia, and the Ukraine flash across a computer screen, while updated commodity prices roll across the bottom, allowing an Iowa farmer to know if he should sell or withhold his harvest. I was on a farm (what could be more “natural”?), but also in the midst of a rational reconstruction of a farm, with the crops and equipment of a traditional farm, and men and women who looked and talked and lived like farmers, but who were also world citizens who visited their Chinese sister-cities in the winter and attended international conventions and, in the midst of their harvests, would host visiting foreign writers with lavish farm banquets. They were on first-name terms with their congressmen and senators in Washington, and testified at agricultural hearings with all the alacrity and pertinence of a Fleming or Abbe.
An influential world minority, “temporal millionnaires” live outside the rigid bars of standard time. For them, through jet travel and e-mail, time zones come and go like Abbe’s dreamy isotherms. As with the nineteenth-century railroad grid, the Internet is clogged, but its partitioning, or any kind of regulation, is strenuously resisted. The work-at-home types, the twenty-four-hour stock traders, the freelancers, all live outside of their time zones. My San Francisco neighborhood is full of young men and women walking their dogs at eleven o’clock in the morning, enjoying brunch in sidewalk cafés. But don’t be fooled: they put in their hours, some of them defined by the Tokyo markets, some by New York, many by an electronic tether to Silicon Valley, or even Bangalore. We have yet to devise a system of time that enhances the globalization we see around us wherever we go.
My darkened study is a winking harbor of red and green lights—nothing is ever off. The great toggle of the Industrial Age, on/off, has been overridden—the world is a vast network of sentinel technologies sleeping with one eye always open. To be “off” is to be unplugged, a way no one can afford to be. Airplanes communicate in Universal Coordinated Time, indifferent as the railroads had been to the time zones they’re passing over. Someday, and I imagine it will not be distant, we will communicate directly in time, and through time, in some version of Fleming’s universal day, a day whose coordinates are positioned overhead, satellite versions of Yeats’s golden birds, meridians in the sky, out of nature all together (and do we still need the earth’s rotation to establish a day?). Can’t we recompose time itself?
We hear complaints of the “time bind,” of running out of time. But time is what we make of it, and for a hundred years we have been stuffing the Industrial Age hour, the workday and workweek and the Industrial Age time zone with more and more work, more things to do, and faster, more efficient, ways of doing them. But the hour is not sacred. It reminds me a bit of the school day and the school year, which are being stretched now to accommodate more students and more learning. The time is out there, if we stretch it—or, once again, if we assert ourselves against its tyranny. Standard time, which had been the operating system of a new technology, is finally an obstruction to some, and an irrelevance to many more.
The dominant technology of our age, the computer, is restless. We’re simultaneously running out of time, but no longer confined by it. The World Wide Web maintains its own “timestandards,” an almost perfect echo of the railroad “time conventions” of the nineteenth century. We don’t know what sleek new solution will come slouching out of Silicon Valley, but if it needs to change time again, it will. Fleming’s cosmic time always had a Trekkie feel to it. Its defeat, in the very long run, might only be temporary.
Part Three
AFTER THE DECADE OF TIME
11
Britain, 1887
We were seated at breakfast one morning, my wife and I, when the maid brought in a telegram. It was from Sherlock Holmes and ran in this way: “Have you a couple of days to spare? Have just been wired for from the west of England in connection with Boscombe Valley tragedy. Shall be glad if you will come with me. Air and scenery perfect. Leave Paddington by the 11:15.”
—from SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE,
“The Boscombe Valley Mystery”
SHERLOCK HOLMES, that paragon of ordered time, was always sending telegrams to Dr. Watson. A plague of small boys was forever delivering them. There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing by train from Paddington, Euston, or Charing Cross to deserted moors and country estates. So utterly reliable were trains by 1887 (the year of Holmes’s literary debut), and so orderly the countryside, that on the way down to Brighton he could (in “Silver Blaze,” 1890) entertain Watson by gauging minute fluctuations in their velocity merely by timing the telegraph poles, set predictably at sixty-yard intervals, as they flashed by his window. A few quick calculations and he can announce, “Fifty-eight miles an hour,” and a few minutes later, “Fifty-six.” It is another metaphor for standard time itself: the train acting as the sun, the telegraph poles as longitudes. Time is the expression of velocity through measured space; velocity the division of time into distance.
It also tells a small inside story of time that will not surprise readers of this book, but might have eluded the master sleuth himself. The first use of bogies outside North America was on English Pullman cars, on the London-to-Brighton run. One reason for the accuracy of Holmes’s calm calculation of velocity, and the confidence with which it is delivered, i
s the smooth-running, sturdy platform from which it was delivered. His off-the-cuff display of brilliance owes something to Ross Winans’s invention of nearly sixty years before.
Conan Doyle not only created a memorable character in Sherlock Holmes, he was propagandizing for a modern, rational Englishman. The times in England called for a redemption of the national character. British self-confidence was fraying, a hero was needed. And not just any hero, but a perfectly rational, middle-class hero. Even now, there’s something iconic about Holmes’s glancing at a telegram and crumpling it up, or sending a response with its characteristic terseness and light touch (“Air and scenery perfect”). From it radiated a world of unflappable precision, withheld mystery, and repressed emotion that we associate with the perfect English gentleman.
There are only two things wrong with the portrait. By 1887 the bright sun of British scientific and industrial confidence, so engagingly captured in Holmes’s certainties, was hanging very low and very dull in the western sky. The United States, Germany, and even a resurgent France had stolen Britain’s preeminence in all but colonial holdings (which had become an increasing burden) and maritime tonnage. Holmes is a late-Victorian mock-up of vanished mid-Victorian confidence, accepted and beloved by a credulous readership anxious to indulge a new national myth. He belongs with Stanley and Livingston, Sir Richard Burton and Gordon of Khartoum as a creature of the emerging media culture. And, second: so far as I can tell, Holmes was no gentleman. His class origins are mysterious.
