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

by Clark Blaise

  It was not revolution—more, in fact, something closer to the temper of that time and place, a conservative counterrevolutionary riot—that greeted Fleming in Montreal in April 1849. He’d gone to the metropolis three months after his twenty-second birthday to sit for his surveyor’s commission exam, but arrived on a night in which the Houses of Parliament were being torched. He and three young passersby rushed inside the lobby to save the portrait of Queen Victoria. (“Tonight,” he reported, “I slept with the crown.”) In 1850, at twenty-three, building upon two stimulating years as a member of a Toronto debating society (“Whether India or Africa Suffered Most from Europe”), he and a friend started the Canadian Institute. At the first meeting, they were the only attendees. Rather than abandon the dream, they elected officers: Frederick F. Passmore the president, Fleming the secretary-treasurer. A week later, he read a speech to scant attendance; a week after that, a paper on “The Formation and Preservation of Toronto Harbour”; and soon attendance started growing.

  As a good Scots Presbyterian, Fleming was usually full of high-minded New Year’s resolutions, transcribed in perhaps a shaky hand after a day of heavy “first footing” excess. In 1853, the twenty-five-year-old striver offered a glimpse of his busy life, and a view of the future:

  Nothing can be recalled, what is passed not even a second ago, every action is as it were recorded on the minute of time for ever and ever. Do not regret the time I have spent (although I deeply regret other things) and the zeal shown in bringing into existence and into active operation the Canadian Institute because I believe it is calculated to do great good to my adopted country and to begin the New Year I have now resolved to provide it an endowment of £1000—when all that is mortal of me returns to the Mother dust, the interest of which to be annually expended in furthering the object of the Society. To effect this object I have already taken steps to assure my life for that, and may the over ruler of all things enable this humble creature while he lives to lack no opportunity in carrying this scheme out as cheerfully and as easily as it is now commenced.

  The problem facing Fleming—and other Canadian visionaries wishing to import the technologies of Europe and the United States, as well as parliamentary-style, confederated government—was the lack of a forum. (It brings to mind a joke that Canadians hear all of their lives: Ah, blessed Canada! She could have had the technology of America, the government of Britain and the culture of France. What she got was American culture, French government, and British know-how.) Creating a forum for social and scientific ideas lay behind his establishment of the Canadian Institute. Elevating the political discourse, spreading scientific discovery, and making the scattered British colonies more representative and less dependent on Britain was a continual challenge. Too few people were spread over too great an area, segregated into too many competing jurisdictions, and further alienated by religion, language, and cultural tradition, for effective joint action to be anything other than fitful and self-defeating. Fleming was by no means alone as a progressive, but his efforts were often thwarted by the barriers of scale.

  Nevertheless, he persevered. More than nearly anyone in the 1860s, he built the political support for the confederation of the separate British colonies, and succeeded. In the 1870s and early 1880s he orchestrated world support for standard time, and in 1884 he succeeded. Still later, and at great personal cost, he bravely rallied the informal commonwealth of overseas dominions against British communications monopolies, and succeeded in laying the worldwide, undersea cable.

  A thousand miles east of Toronto, in 1851, the Railway Minister of the Nova Scotia colony, Joseph Howe, ventured a prophecy that is almost eerie in its accuracy. Fleming heard it as well, and filed it for later use. Fleming and Howe would not meet for another thirteen years, by which time Howe’s obvious capacity for leadership would carry him to the top of Nova Scotia’s parliamentary ranks.

  Think you that we shall stop even at the Western bounds of Canada, or even at the shores of the Pacific? Vancouver Island with its vast coal treasures, lies beyond. The beautiful islands of the Pacific, and the growing commerce of the ocean, are beyond. Populous China and the rich East are beyond, and the sails of our children’s children will reflect as familiarly the sunbeams of the South as they now brave the angry tempests of the North. The Maritime Provinces which I now address are but the Atlantic frontage of this boundless and prolific region—the wharves upon which its business will be transacted, and beside which its rich argosies are to lie. I believe that many in this room will live to hear the whistle of the steam engine in the passes of the Rocky Mountains, and to take the journey from Halifax to the Pacific in five or six days.

  4

  Time and Mr. Fleming

  During the last fifty years, this new birth of time, this new Nature, begotten by science upon fact, has pressed itself daily and hourly upon our attention, and has worked miracles which have modified the whole fashion of our lives.

  —THOMAS H. HUXLEY, “The Progress of Science” (1887)

  ABOARD THE United Kingdom, a steamship plying the North Atlantic between Quebec City and Glasgow in May of 1863, thirty-six-year-old Sandford Fleming, bearded, frock-coated as always, paces the 235-foot deck, twenty circuits three times a day for his daily three-mile constitutional, smoking his cigars, cheerfully conversing with captain, crew, or passengers. His long night in an Irish country railstation lies thirteen years in the future. The Canadian Pacific Railway is barely a fancy at this time.

  His early achievements in surveying, land investment, map-making, and his various civic ventures like the Canadian Institute have all prospered according to his forecasts. He has engineered one railroad, the thirty-mile Northern. Toronto is still his home. Ottawa, the future capital of a vast dominion, and the city with which Fleming is most identified, is little more than a canal landing in 1863, named Bytown for its founder, Colonel By. Fleming will build a mansion, “Winterholme,” in the Adam style in Ottawa, where he will deed a park and a tropical arboretum. That, too, is in the distant future. In 1863, the vast dominion does not exist. Most of it—the Northwest, the area stretching from the Arctic to the American border, and from Manitoba to the Rockies—had been ceded by the British Crown to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1676, and the company still controls it. The maritime east is comprised of three jealously separate British colonies, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, each controlled by its own elected leader, with separate laws and postage stamps—four, if the poor relation Newfoundland is included.

  There was not yet a country nor a capital, but 1863 and (especially) 1864 would be crucial years for the maturing of Sandford Fleming and for the idea, if not quite yet the reality, of Canada. In 1864 Fleming would travel over twenty thousand miles for the cause of Canadian unity, some of it in comparative luxury, but much of it in hundred-mile-a-day horse-drawn sleds through the snows of Quebec and New Brunswick. Exactly half of his life had been spent in Canada. Married eight years, he was the father of four (on the way to seven), secure in his reputation as surveyor, an engineer, and a young man of enormous civic involvement, energy, and idealism. He had begun to take on duties that would define his next fifty years. In 1863 he had been given the opportunity to put the two halves of his life, Scotch and Canadian, back together. In the course of his voyage to Scotland, England, and Ireland, he became a public man, a visionary. This was his first trip back. Forty-three more would follow.

  The voyage began on a familiar note, Fleming taking moral instruction from every aspect of nature and industry, projecting the heavy, elegiac mood of melancholic uplift. Passing under the Victoria Bridge in Montreal, on the way to Quebec City to meet the sailing of the United Kingdom, he noted in his travel journal, which he kept for the benefit (moral) and entertainment of his children:

  How few in passing through now think of the men who built it, the men who planned, who laid these stones and drove their rivets, who think now of the anxious days Hodges spent when the ice was hourly expected to c
arry away the scaffolding under the center tubes; who dreams now of that army of skilled workmen who crossed the broad Atlantic to erect a national monument for Canadians, a monument that even if it does not pay six percent is far more useful than the pyramids and who asks how much percent they pay?

  The engineering profession, always a high calling—and often a source of profound despair—for Fleming, is the link between science and society. The engineer calculates the cost of change, understands debentures and interest rates, the politically possible, the socially beneficial. He reads the future.

  The United Kingdom steamed toward Glasgow (he noted) at nine miles an hour, burning eighteen tons of coal a day. Each morning’s brisk circuit with the captain elicited new bits of information, speed and direction, weather and navigation problems. Collisions at sea were deemed improbable, icebergs, oddly enough, a more legitimate threat. He illustrated his journals, sketching whales, fellow passengers, the wrecked hull of a fishing boat floating off the Grand Banks, and smokestacks of distant steamers. The various personalities of Sandford Fleming were all taking shape: engineer, visionary, Canadian, Scot, patriot, networker, Empire Loyalist.

  He was on a mission, carrying a petition to the Colonial Office in London. The (mostly) pioneering Scotch settlers in the Red River Colony, near today’s Winnipeg, had chosen him—he was one of them, after all, as well as a reputable surveyor and railroad builder—to petition London for a railroad link from Upper Canada (Ontario) to relieve their isolation. The only way in or out of the Red River was by the ever-attentive American rail service from St. Paul, or river steamers “down to Canada” (the Red being one of North America’s few north-flowing rivers) to the Canadian border. Thereafter, Canadian river steamers or ox-drawn wagons moved goods and emigrants to the colony. Buffalo herds, fording the rivers, could still force steamers to tie up for a day at a time.

  The colonists had sound geographical reasons to feel isolated. The Canadian Shield, the oldest geologic structure on the planet—the granite nubs of ancient mountain ranges, pitted and pocked with lakes and bogs—is an effective barrier to any east-west communication. Beginning less than a hundred miles east of the colony, the land turns swampy and forested, leading to hundreds of miles of bare granite, mosquito-infested lakes, and unsounded tamarack sloughs. A few rough trails had been hacked out by fur-trappers and coureurs du bois over the years, following the higher and drier ground, but canoes were the primary form of transportation. The segmentation of Canada around Lake Superior was profound and seemingly inescapable, nothing like the minor annoyance posed by the chain of picturesque hills called the American Appalachians.

  Geography and isolation, or fear of annexation, and skirmishes—often bloody—with the Métis (mixed-race French-Indian settlers of the Northwest who were militantly opposed to falling under Upper Canadian authority) were not the only problems. They were not even uppermost. Essentially, the colony could not be linked by rail to Upper Canada until the Northwest Territories, still part of the original Hudson’s Bay land grant, could be legally transferred to an entity called Canada, and Canada did not yet exist. Lower Canada, the French-dominated Quebec, would hardly agree to the vast enlargement of English-speaking Upper Canada. In other words, the vulnerability, loneliness, and isolation of the Red River colonists—their essential “Who are we?” that defines the Canadian experience—mirrored the problems of British North America in general. Britain no longer controlled it, no longer even wanted it, and was anxious to turn over as much self-government and costs as the Canadians were able to assume. But Canadians felt the need for British protection on the American-dominated continent. In particular, Britain did not want to involve herself militarily or financially with the defense of Canadian sovereignty against the growing threat of American annexation.

  In 1863 the Americans were locked in the most crucial year of the Civil War, and already eyeing the British colonies as hostile territory, ripe for annexation. Britain, given its need for foreign cotton, and chary perhaps of the North’s rising industrial might, clearly favored the Confederate side. Many Northerners suspected that Confederates or their sympathizers might conduct raids on Union troops from Canadian havens. Such attacks from Canadian soil, Fleming and others feared, apart from violating neutrality, could be seized on as a provocation for a preemptive invasion, especially by an activist ideologue like the American secretary of state, William Seward. Fleming’s English friend J. W. Wood wrote from London: “The North, whether right or wrong in the whole question of the war, have a good right to demand that our territory shall not be made a basis for such attacks upon themselves.”

  Seward, a leading advocate of “Manifest Destiny,” held the notion that the United States was not merely a continental power but destined by its dynamism and the full exercise of its republican virtues to be the continent, as his 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia would soon bear out. He did not disguise his designs on Canada and several of the Caribbean islands. Just a few years after the war, during the Ulysses Grant administration, noted Henry Adams in his Education: “[Adams] listened with incredulous stupor while Sumner [Senator Charles Sumner, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate] unfolded his plan for concentrating and pressing every possible American claim against England, with a view of compelling the cession of Canada to the United States.”

  There is no evidence, incidentally, that any but a small minority of British colonists in North America shared the mother country’s sympathies. Forty thousand Canadians volunteered for service on the Union side. Before the year was out, however, Fleming raised a company of seventy home guards in Toronto to repel a possible invasion. Thankfully, his skills and those of his neighbors were never tested.

  ONE OF THE oddities of his voyage aboard the United Kingdom that he found amusing, and which he felt his children would especially enjoy, was the ever-earlier lunchtime occasioned by the ship’s rapid progress northeastward toward Glasgow. He figured that lunch was being served half an hour earlier each day, by stomach time, due to their eastward travel. Always the instructor, or the Victorian father, he tried keeping his children close to him as best he could in “real” time by coordinating the North Atlantic time with that of Toronto:

  In the evening the passengers as usual amused themselves, reading, playing whist and drafts. On deck about 11 o’clock enjoying a smoke with the captain who is most vigilant and is a little anxious about a fog coming in although there is no danger to be feared except a collision with another vessel—and the chances of this are exceedingly small seeing even in daytime and in clear weather we seldom see any other draft when off “the Banks.” Left the Captain on deck with a good southerly wind and the ship scudding through the water at about 11 miles an hour, and thus went the eighth day aboard.

  Wednesday 20 May. Up about seven o’clock ship’s time and had an hour on deck before breakfast. The ship going as I left it last night with the same wind and from the same quarters. The fog has disappeared. The air is genial and moist, the wind strong but not cold, no ships were seen during the night and not a thing but the blue foaming sea within the scope of our vision.

  Neither yesterday nor today did we get an observation of the sun, the sky being cloudy, but from dead reckoning the position of the ship today is lat. 49’25” long. 39’32” compared with that of Toronto about long. 79’20”. It will be seen that we are about 40 degrees nearer Greenwich and therefore 40/360th or about 1/9th the circumference of the Globe (in this latitude) away from Toronto and therefore our time on board should be 1/9th of 24 hours faster than Toronto time, hence where it is noon by my watch it is 2:40 o’clock by ship’s time. Between noon yesterday and noon today we ran easterly about five and a half degrees longitude and as each degree of longitude is equal to 24 hours divided by 360, or four minutes of time, the ship clock has to be moved forward four minutes for each degree of longitude passed over and thus today five and a half times 4 equals 22 minutes. At this rate our lunch which is at noon will come abo
ut twenty minutes sooner every day. The distance between Quebec and Glasgow by the course of the ship is about 2900 miles and this afternoon we have passed over about half that distance. We have now been eight days out but we hope to gain a day on the remaining half and in that case may get into port a week from today.

  He obviously knew how to compute the time, although his method was, as might be expected, a curious mixture of the natural and rational. He was computing the nautical day, “natural” time at sea, yet not making the “rational” leap into mean (averaged) time. Standardization simply had not yet become an urgent matter, except with regard to the floating lunch hour.

  When he landed in Glasgow, he ran into a bootblack, “wee Robert Gordon,” whose pert, aggressive ways sold him on a shine. He also hired the boy to take him on a walking tour of Glasgow.

  I invited the little boot-black to breakfast with me which he gladly accepted. He sat opposite me and we had a long chat. He supports a widowed mother and earns from 8/- to 12/- per week. He had two boiled eggs, one cup of good coffee, two thick slices of bread and butter for the sum of tenpence or fivepence each. Robert then took me from Jamaica Street where we breakfasted along Buchanan and Argyle Streets to see the shops and I left him at the Exchange to pursue his vocation. I found Robert an intelligent boy and one who is bound to succeed in life.