Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time
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Acclaim for Clark Blaise’s
Time Lord
“Splendid.… There’s something sparkling and wonderful about how smoothly and surely Clark Blaise links the intellectual materials of science, social history and the arts.”
—The Oregonian
“The book charms and fascinates.… Inspired by affinity and curiosity, Blaise delivers.”
—The Hartford Courant
“An important history of ideas.… Blaise writes with perfect pitch and graceful narrative.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Fascinating.… Blaise’s style in this compelling narrative is lively and witty.”
—BookPage
“Time Lord is one of those rare books that successfully brings to a broad readership compelling ideas generally buried in academic articles.… [With] lustrous and elegant prose, Blaise tells the story of how standard time quietly revolutionized the Western understanding of self and society.”
—The Edmonton Journal
“Blaise’s elegant little work … is a dazzling meditation on social change.”
—Maclean’s
ALSO BY CLARK BLAISE
Story Collections
A North American Education
Tribal Justice
Resident Alien
Man and His World
Brief Parables of the Twentieth Century:
New and Selected Stories
Novels
Lunar Attractions
Lusts
If I Were Me
Non-Fiction
Days and Nights in Calcutta
(with Bharati Mukherjee)
The Sorrow and the Terror
(with Bharati Mukherjee)
I Had a Father: a post-modern
autobiography
Here, There, and Everywhere: American,
Canadian, and Post-Modern Literature
CLARK BLAISE
Time Lord
Clark Blaise, former head of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, lives in San Francisco with his wife, Bharati Mukherjee. Time Lord is his sixteenth book.
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2002
Copyright © 2000 by Clark Blaise
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of Orion Publishing Group Ltd., London, in 2000, and subsequently in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Sailing to Byzantium” from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, revised second edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1928 by Macmillan Publishing Company, copyright renewed 1956 by Georgie Yeats. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Blaise, Clark.
Time lord : Sir Sandford Fleming and the creation of standard time / Clark Blaise.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references
eISBN: 978-0-307-76655-7
1. Time—Systems and standards—History. 2. Fleming, Sandford, Sir, 1827–1915. I. Title.
QB223.B58 2001 389′.17′09—dc21 00-058893
Author photograph © Jerry Bauer
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
To John and Myrna Metcalf
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword: The Gauge Age
PART ONE
A (Very) Brief History of Time
1 The Discovery of Time
2 Time and Democracy
3 What Times Is It?
4 Time and Mr. Fleming
5 The Decade of Time, 1875–85
6 The Practice of Time
PART TWO
Time Was in the Air
7 Notes on Time and Victorian Science
8 Riding the Rails
9 The Aesthetics of Time
10 The Prime(s) of Mr. Sandford Fleming
PART THREE
After the Decade of Time
11 Britain, 1887
12 Time, Morals, and Locomotion, 1889
Afterword: The Ghost of Sandford Fleming
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Foreword
THE GAUGE AGE
NATURALISTS AND PSYCHOLOGISTS believe that of all forms of animal life, only man possesses a sense of time. It may be our defining characteristic. The historian of ideas Daniel J. Boorstin devotes the first three chapters of The Discoverers to time and the history of its measurement, because nothing is more fundamental to our nature than the observation of time and the struggle to measure it accurately. Without an agreed-upon standard of time, we cannot mark or measure change. There can be no innovation, no discovery. Like Robinson Crusoe notching a stick, or prisoners in the Gulag scratching a line for every day of their confinement, we are embedded in time. Even when we leave society behind, our very sanity depends on periodicities. What day is it? How long have I been here? The way we know time today has a great deal to do with the creation of standard time, and the man this book, in part, celebrates.
His name fades with each new generation, although plaques and memorials abound. A college and a few secondary schools are named for him, but fifty or sixty years ago, Sir Sandford Fleming would have won the possibly self-ironizing title of “outstanding Canadian of the nineteenth century.” Born in Scotland, in the manufacturing town of Kirkcaldy, in 1827, the son of a local contractor, he received his six years of formal education in the town (burgh) school, and then apprenticed himself another six years to the local land surveyor, John Sang. In 1845, at the age of eighteen, he and his older brother sailed for Canada. A cousin presented him at the docks with a silver sovereign. His father entrusted to him a valuable watch with a built-in sundial, an emblem of the time system he would eventually overthrow. The ticket to his future on the sailing ship Brilliant cost the sizable sum of £4, for which he and his brother were guaranteed a daily quantity of drinkable water and basic uncooked rations.
In the towns and cities of Scotland, horse-drawn omnibuses made regular stops, their painted sides announced their final destinations. “Glasgow Docks,” it might say, “with train connections to Liverpool” to meet all sailings. The young men whose wooden trunks contained meager treasures of books and professional instruments, the tins of flour and tea, and the bedding, were headed for Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. Some chose the more alien challenge of the United States. Emigration was the inescapable destiny of the bright and enterprising Scotch, as they called themselves: populate the Empire, build the machines, run the engines, make their fortunes. The lessons of their straitened childhood and the strictures of the Presbyterian Church kept them sober and responsible for the rest of their lives.
They were the steamfitters, the boilermakers, the gauge-readers, the engineers of the world, proud of their hardiness and frugality, quick to grasp the mechanical advantage. Victorian pop psychology assigned various aptitudes to distinct “races,” and the Scotch were thought to have an uncanny affinity for tech
nology. (The stereotype carried forth to our own fantasies in which “Scotty” worked his mechanical magic on the starship Enterprise.) Kirkcaldy, on the north shore of the Firth of Forth, across the water from Edinburgh, was also the birthplace of Adam Smith. Thomas Carlyle had served as master in the same burgh school a decade before Fleming’s matriculation. Linoleum was invented and manufactured in Kirkcaldy. There’s probably not a significant settlement in Scotland that could not provide a comparable list of famous sons and their useful inventions. Fleming’s later friend Andrew Carnegie, one of the America-bound, hailed from the nearby Fifeshire town of Dunfermline. Samuel Cunard, the shipping magnate, and the parents of James J. Hill, founder of the Great Northern Railroad, the first two prime ministers of the Canadian nation, Sir John A. Macdonald and Alexander Mackenzie, and untold bankers and businessmen, who collectively established Canada as Britain’s leading colony among presumed equals, had all made the same passage and adjustment from Scotland to Canada.
What they carried with them was their faith, their confidence, and their “genius for hard work.” They remembered Scotland fondly, returned often, and contributed materially to its survival. They got on well with Americans, and many, of course, like Carnegie or Alexander Graham Bell or J. J. Hill, are associated almost entirely with their American successes.
There’s a subtle parallel to be traced between Scotland and Canada, two non-countries by the standards of Victorian diplomacy, unrecognized, even threatened, by their powerful southern neighbors. The exuberant reticence of the Scotch—sober, hardworking, calculating to the last penny—was particularly appreciated in the underpopulated void of autonomous colonies called British North America before the 1867 British North America Act that created Canada. Popular opinions of the Scotch were quite a bit more flattering than the general view of their fellow Canadians, the Irish and French. Doubtless, the Victorian mind distinguished them for their sturdy Protestantism. But the Scotch, like the country they had left and the new territory they were building, were negotiating a very tight passage between proud survival and overt surrender. They were “emigrants,” not immigrants. They had known poverty in their homeland, but overnight, it seemed, had been transformed into hardy transplants in Canada, the United States, or in England itself. Fleming’s life is one long demonstration of competing loyalties to Canada, to Scotland, and to the idea of the British Empire. As a prime example of the successful emigrant, he nevertheless lamented on return visits to Scotland the loss of his distinctive accent, and even his ear for the purer strains of the “north of Tweed” dialect. Only in Kirkcaldy was he taken for a native.
The Fleming brothers nearly died on that forty-four-day passage in 1845. On one fearful night in the midst of a North Atlantic gale, Sandford took readings of wind speed and direction, calculated the ship’s heading and tonnage, and determined that they might not survive until morning. He inscribed that sober assessment, adding a declaration of faith in God and a profession of filial gratitude, bottled the note, and threw it overboard. Naturally, his life being one long monument to industry and good fortune, the bottle was picked up on a North Devon beach and delivered to his parents not many months after he’d settled in Peterborough, his first Canadian home. He kept that letter in the top drawer of his desk the rest of his life, along with the never-spent silver sovereign his cousin gave him at the Glasgow docks. In Peterborough he found no work, only discouragement. He traveled to other Ontario towns, taking surveys and striking town maps off his own lithography stones and selling them. His notebooks detail every sale, every expense. Half of his earnings were sent back to the family. Within three years, his parents joined him in Canada, settling on a farm their son had managed to purchase.
And one should not ignore the lesson of his teacher, the land surveyor he had left behind in Kirkcaldy. John Sang and his sons remained an important force in Fleming’s life. Kirkcaldians remembered Sang as “a practical and mechanical genius” (such praise fairly defines the social ideal of Victorian Britain), with a particular aptitude for turning out engineering students. His headquarters were more a technical college than a surveyor’s office. He invented an instrument—an elaborate gauge, a converter with a readout—for automatically measuring acreage from a map, by tracing the perimeter of the area in question.
Sang’s invention—and Fleming’s more abstract inventions for world standard time—were rooted in the Victorian era’s great facility and fascination with gauges, which are more than simple needles on a graduated dial. Steam power, the primary energy source of Fleming’s day, was inherently dangerous and demanded constant attention, the gauge being the only practical way of monitoring internal heat and pressure.
The gauge is an intricate conversion device, a kind of translator between unspoken languages. Scales, thermometers, watches, fuel pumps and all their myriad applications are gauges, instantly declaring the equivalence of disparate and invisible events. “You’ve lost weight … you have a fever … you’re running low … you’ve got ten minutes …” Like crude computers, they monitor one set of operations and convert it to a different data flow—to time, to temperature, to volume, to cost, to profit, to depletion. Any new invention with the hope of catching on in the nineteenth-century marketplace fairly bristled with valves, and glittered with elaborate brass displays, like the illustrations accompanying Jules Verne’s undersea and lunar adventures or, much later, the time machine of H. G. Wells. They allowed Victorians to read, and to trust what they couldn’t see. The Steam Age was the Age of the Gauge, a technology of convertibilities, which also had a strong influence on the standard time movement.
Sang’s story would end unhappily. In later years, he counted himself a “coward” for not going to Canada, where Fleming had offered to set him up, or to Wisconsin, where other Kirkcaldians had settled. From two lives that began so much alike, two very different destinies can be traced: those who left and those who stayed. John Sang and his sons lost everything they’d built, they sold their instruments and declared bankruptcy, ending up working for others, copiers and deed certifiers, in a Belfast office.
By contrast, Fleming’s life is a story of ever-growing success. Five years after arriving in Peterborough, and then Toronto, he had made his mark as a surveyor and lithographer. He took the first soundings of Toronto harbor and struck the first map of the city’s streets, including the harbor and beaches, then wrote papers on the geologic history of Lake Ontario and its successive prehistoric ledges. He lithographed other surveys of Ontario towns, selling copies both remarkably accurate and artful. He was a fine amateur artist and often illustrated his own work. From surveying he made the logical leap to civil engineering, built railroads, designed and engraved the first Canadian postage stamp (the “Beaver,” valued for its industry and engineering skills, not its pelt), and founded the Canadian Institute (which grew into the Royal Society of Canada), where he would deliver most of his scientific addresses, including the classic papers on standard time. He wrote a dozen books, served thirty-five years as titular Chancellor of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario (in preparation for which he cited his six years of training in a Scottish town school), devised and facilitated world standard time and, finally, the world-circling sub-Pacific cable, which earned him his knighthood in 1897.
The Montreal Gazette characterized him, late in life, as “a man not happy without some great reform.” Among these were: the Presbyterian prayerbook; metric/imperial unification (urging the French, with predictable results, to raise the meter’s length to forty inches from 39.37, so that the systems could be made fully convertible); proportional parliamentary representation; and stock-market accountability. With a membership in over seventy international societies, he was for half a century Canada’s voice on the world stage. For all of that, at the moment of his greatest success, the Prime Meridian Conference, which he had orchestrated, he suffered a failure, a bitter failure, partly of his own making.
THE SUBJECT of time holds a universal fascination, but this pa
rticular inquiry is also inspired by the appeal of one man and his age. Sandford Fleming put me in touch not only with the richness of the Victorians, our direct ancestors, but also with the country of my parents and of nearly half my life. Today, the differences between Canada and the United States are small indeed, but such was not the case a century and a quarter ago. My niche in the writing world has been to mark and measure those disappearing distinctions.
I turned sixty years old while writing this book, but I am still the avid child listening to his mother’s stories of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and still uncovering the untold tales of his father’s Quebec. As I sifted through the boxes of Fleming letters in the National Archives, I could hear their long-dead voices afresh, and kept repeating the mantra that informs so much of this book: it’s about time. It’s all about time.
Part One
A (VERY) BRIEF
HISTORY OF TIME
1
The Discovery of Time
AN OBVIOUS question demands to be answered from the outset: Can anyone have a definition of time? Time is invisible and indescribable, endlessly fascinating and universally compelling. Time is everywhere; thus nowhere. It animates the world, yet nothing survives it. We can only guess how it started, or when it will end. It is our intimate assassin. One thing it lacks, however, except in Greek myth, is a compelling narrative.
Natural time—the time of the gods, the sun and the moon—starts in a savage, glorious myth and ends on an Irish railway platform in 1876, when Sandford Fleming missed his train. Originally, Time was embodied in a god, Uranus. He ruled over an immutable world. His children were the seven visible planets. Acting on a prophecy that his life was in danger from one of them, Uranus did the natural thing and slaughtered them all. Their mother, his sister Gaia, was able to hide one son, Kronos. Kronos, upon maturity, did the natural thing—castrated and killed his father. He married his sister, Rhea. When he learned of a plot against him, he cannibalized his children, but for Zeus, whose sleeping body Rhea had replaced with a stone. Zeus, of course, would castrate and kill his father.