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

by Clark Blaise

  The observatory at Greenwich was indeed honored and renowned (and profitable, due to the selling of its charts, the so-called ephemerides, to the 90 percent of the world’s shipping that employed them), but the national observatories in Rome, Paris, and Berlin, and the Naval Observatory in Washington were no less well-equipped. Without science to give backing to a particular meridian, there could be no “neutral” determination, and perfect scientific neutrality, not commercial popularity, was the nonnegotiable French demand before they would consider joining any international convention. That was the great challenge Sandford Fleming faced in his subsequent papers: to use the political and commercial advantages of Greenwich, yet appear not to use them at the same time. The drama behind the election of Greenwich, against fierce opposition as well as the rejection of a sophisticated compromise, is the major part of the struggle for standard time. The decision would not be rendered until 1884, at the Prime Meridian Conference.

  FOR THE fifteen years between the closing of the American frontier, in 1869, and the conference, a series of proposals for reducing the number of local times was launched and debated. In 1872 Professor Charles Dowd, principal of Temple Grove Ladies’ Seminary in Saratoga Springs, New York (now Skidmore College), revised his original proposal, which had been based on the Washington meridian, and floated a five-time-zone system for North American railroads that is nearly identical to the system used today. His time zones varied each by one hour, each zone covering fifteen degrees of longitude, counting in fifteen-degree leaps westward from Greenwich. Professor Benjamin Peirce of Yale University, as the Atlantic Monthly had written, had also proposed a similar reform, as had Professor Abbe. Time was in the air, but all of the reforms thus far were attached to railroad use only, confined to North America, and dependent upon the still-unratified Greenwich meridian.

  Dowd, Abbe, and Peirce all appeared on the verge of proposing standard time for the world, and not just for North American railroads and their passengers. But no one could imagine the mighty railroads changing their time-standards merely by crossing an arbitrary, invisible line. Railroads could change time, but time could not change railroads. By extending the fifteen-degrees-per-hour series of time zones around the world, looking beyond the Atlantic and Pacific shores of North America, et voilà, they would have it. But there are two very good reasons why their solutions would not have worked in 1874, and why, in fact, it would take another ten years to overcome them.

  First of all, and most obviously, the most progressive American reforms were predicted on Greenwich, but Greenwich had not been agreed to by the world. The United States Navy, and its commercial fleet, and of course Britain and its colonies all used Greenwich charts (the two countries alone accounted for nearly the entirety of Greenwich’s popularity), but ten percent of the world did not. There were, in fact, ten official prime meridians in use at the time, all of them historically justified, all with their national pride and clientele intact, which made shipping schedules nearly as confusing as catching trains. The United States was free to adopt whatever standard time it wished, of course, but it would have no relevance outside of its own territory, or the industry it was meant to serve. And, second, as extensive as North America was, it still did not have to cope with the change of dates, a date line, and where such a line might be drawn.

  Dowd’s 1872 innovation had been to break with American practice by dropping the Washington meridian and adopting, or simply assuming, the Greenwich prime. Dowd, a Yale-trained professor (voted outstanding member of the class of 1857), had been provoked into action originally by those three “official” railroad clocks in the Buffalo train station reflecting Albany, Columbus, and Buffalo time. He had written, with philosophical exasperation: “The traveler’s watch was to him but a delusion; clocks at stations staring each other in the face defiant of harmony either with one another or with surrounding local time and all wildly at variance with the traveler’s watch, baffled all intelligent interpretation.” But Professor Dowd was easily dismissed as an impractical dreamer (a common designation for professors at most times in American history, and never more so than in the Gilded Age), and an outsider to the railroad fraternity. His proposals were politely listened to by William F. Allen, secretary of the American Railroad Association, and other grand-trunk managers, and shelved.

  The revolution in time-reckoning on the North American continent came not through theory or governmental intervention, but by way of old-fashioned American commercial innovation. On April 8, 1883, in St. Louis, at the semiannual meeting of the General Time Convention of the American Railroad Association, fifty managers of grand-trunk railroads voted to accept a plan put forth by their secretary, Mr. Allen. It would reduce the number of time standards in use by American railroads from nearly fifty to a mere four. Allen named them Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific, the same four names, though not the same four zones, that are used today. A fifth, that of the Canadian maritime provinces, designated Intercolonial, was added a few months later.

  If ever a demonstration of temporal confusion were needed, St. Louis was the city to provide it. Delegates arriving on any of fourteen different railroads would experience the most blatant example of temporal meltdown to be found anywhere in the country. St. Louis observed six official railroad times. Although Allen’s reforms were presented to the managers as a simple business decision, history has shown that the standardization of railroad time across the continent would have fundamental implications for every part of American society. A contemporary journal hailed its implementation as “one of the most complete scientific successes of the century,” and “the first step in an inevitable process of world-time standardization.” Allen’s formula for railroad standardization in North America, however, played no role at all in the world standardization movement, partially for reasons already mentioned, and even more centrally, for the manner in which Mr. Allen designed it. The prediction of world standardization proved accurate, however, thanks mainly to the efforts of Fleming and his Washington friend, Cleveland Abbe, eleven months later.

  And as for the first part of that glowing magazine quote, a claim of such scientific success deserves closer scrutiny: Darwin, Pasteur, Edison, Bell … and William F. Allen?

  Allen was a trim, thirty-seven-year-old, New Jersey-born civil engineer. His father, also a civil engineer and an army officer, had been killed in the Civil War the same year Allen, at sixteen, began work as a rodman on the Camden & Amboy. Six years later he was appointed resident engineer on the West Jersey. The manager of that line, General W. J. Sewell, was later elected to the Senate from New Jersey, and remained an important patron. Allen’s rise was a familiar pattern in that frantic, brawling, postwar, frontier-closing, land-grabbing era. Call it the Ben Franklin syndrome—a bright, self-educated, ambitious near-orphan works hard, rises early, stays late, attracts rewards and influential friends. Success came early, and conspicuously.

  Allen’s temperament, “the genius of hard work,” his experience and contacts, combined to make him a formidable advocate for, and often a bulwark against, new ideas. He understood the tight fraternal nuances of railroad management and operated as the buffer between an increasingly impatient public, outraged by the dozens of competing and often unpredictable time standards, and a heedless, immensely profitable industry. Railroads were the driving force of the economy and a magnet for ambitious freebooters. The great fear of the industry was that their profits, competitive practices, and monopolistic ambitions—along with mounting complaints from manufacturers, farmers, and passengers—would attract government regulation. The frequently drawn analogy of nineteenth-century railroads to the contemporary world of computer entrepreneurs and dot-com cowboys is not misapplied. The arrogance of such industries can be annoying, but the real fear is that behemoth technologies, like the railroad, or the computer, simply obliterate earlier modes of transport or communication, leaving the public helpless, as in the case of airline passengers trapped by a snowstorm, with nowhere to go and n
o other way to get there. The technologies they replaced quickly became relics, museum pieces.

  Over the Decade of Time, in his official capacities as secretary of the Association, as editor of The Railroad Traveler’s Official Guide (the rail passenger’s indispensable machete through the temporal jungle), and as a member of the American Metrological Association, Allen had reviewed dozens of proposals for time reform. Not all of them were flawed, but every one had been rejected. Those originating from Professor Dowd, despite their cogent argumentation, detailed maps, and painstaking, station-by-station research, had been listened to tolerantly and approvingly by the railroad managers. When they were originally proposed, their solutions were deemed premature. Meltdown loomed, but had not yet occurred.

  Dowd’s proposed zones were neat, clean, and geometrical. They followed longitudinal meridians with a serene indifference to political and commercial boundaries in their path. Every fifteen degrees, starting at Greenwich, marked the center of a new hour, retaining the same minute and second. Allen’s zones, by contrast, were as fussy as a Victorian parlor. They were the result of a compromise between railroad intransigence and passenger frustration. Yet, at the end of the day, Allen was the railroad man, and his zones were more accommodating to railroad authority than to passenger convenience.

  To assure his audience, he stated: “It has been my earnest endeavor to look upon this question purely with a view to the practical requirements of the railways, to pose nothing which is unprecedented, or that will bring about a condition of affairs which, viewed in its most unfavorable light as affecting the running trains, does not at present exist, or has not been already practically overcome; to avoid making the remedy worse than the disease.”

  In other words, no ground-shifting proposals. He also articulated a position that can be seen as far-reaching, at least insofar as it reflects the view of the primacy of corporate authority over political jurisdiction: “From a railroad standpoint we have nothing to do with state lines or national boundaries, but must confine ourselves purely to the needs and be governed by the limitations of railway operations.” Here, Allen was running a risk of attracting government scrutiny, even in midst of the friendly, laissez-faire style of postwar Republican presidents, none more typical than the sitting Chester A. Arthur.

  In Allen’s time the public were accustomed to city, county, and state governments deciding, or at least debating, proposed changes that might have profound effects on their lives. In the case of railroad standardization, a purely “corporate” decision with enormous public consequences had been made in private, without citizen input or oversight. A fundamental reordering of every citizen’s private day was about to occur, ordered for the convenience of an interstate industry that took for granted its jurisdiction over local concerns. The lines between corporate freedom and governmental oversight were obviously hazy. Allen immediately began lobbying route managers and regional presidents. The proposals went into effect seven months later, as soon as the entire Association read them and approved.

  We are not scientists dealing with abstractions, but practical business men seeking to achieve a practical result. We have a common language, a common standard of money, of weights and of measures, notwithstanding the enormous extent of our country; but even approximate or relative common time is yet to be achieved. Less than ten years ago we had seventy standards, today we have about fifty. For this much relief let us be duly thankful.

  Allen’s revisions also favored five time zones for North America, and acknowledged the Greenwich meridian; but, unlike Dowd, he’d arrived at his maps by consulting the railroad grid and noting where the preponderance of similar time standards were clustered. Thus, he constructed his own zones, reflecting as faithfully as possible the preexisting railroad operating standards so as not to inconvenience published schedules. The edges of Allen’s time zones were necessarily ragged, as they followed the existing rail lines, allowing them to retain their time standards to their terminals, or to the next major rail junction. (In other words, they did not automatically change upon crossing an invisible meridian.) He was lenient with a number of major lines, allowing them to operate outside the stricter standards of their neighbors. Yet although Allen’s zones were pushed a little to the east of Dowd’s, in practical application the effects were very similar. The differences were more in the biographies of their devisers than in the outlines of their respective time zones.

  Allen’s eastern zone, for example, ran from Maine to Detroit, then south to Bristol, Tennessee. But … railroads in Ohio and Pennsylvania west of Pittsburgh, and all those in Georgia, would be included in the western (i.e., central) section. Five other major railroads would be allowed to run to their eastern terminals in Buffalo, Charlotte, and Salamanca, New York, by the central time standard. Allen’s bold proposal was beginning to look nearly as complicated as the original problem; the remedy was nearly as bad as the problem.

  One solution that did not occur to Allen (and which, admittedly, courts absurdity and takes some getting used to, even today), is the simple expedient of printing all schedules in local time. A train might leave an eastern city at noon, and arrive in a nearby central-zone station before noon, as we often do today when flying. Allen’s plan retained the train’s original time standard for as long as possible, all the way to its terminal or point of transfer. Dozens of exceptions were permitted for popular routes. A complicated map accompanied the new reforms.

  Dowd and Allen embodied some of the great philosophical divides of the nineteenth century. Allen counted trees; Dowd saw the forest. Allen was a tinkerer, Dowd a synthesizer. Allen’s plan was derived from railroad usage; Dowd’s from passenger convenience. Allen was the pragmatic, politically expedient man of the world, Dowd the dreamer, the impractical professor. In the autodidact world of nineteenth-century American science and philosophy, deduction (a priori thinking) and induction (a posteriori thinking) were both acceptable approaches to a problem. And, I might add, Dowd was a New Englander, a child of transcendentalism; Allen was the New American Man.

  On Sunday morning, November 18, 1883, railroad standard time (“Vanderbilt time,” sneered its opponents, but it was more accurately Allen time) became a reality across North America. That Sunday came to be known as “the Sunday of Two Noons,” since towns along the eastern edges of the four new American “time belts” had to turn their clocks back half an hour, creating a second noon, in order to conform to towns along the western edges of the same belt. No one in the country would “gain” or “lose” more than half an hour of his life. The dominant technology of the age had set the new time standard. Up in Ottawa, Sandford Fleming hailed it as “a quiet revolution.”

  Within days, about 70 percent of schools, courts, and local governments had adopted railroad time as their official standard. The federal government, much to Allen’s relief, did not get on the bandwagon. (In fact, Congress did not get around to ratifying standard time until 1918.) For the first time in history, Boston and Buffalo, Washington and New York, Atlanta and Columbus, San Francisco and Spokane, all shared the same hour and minute. It didn’t matter that Boston would be bright with the new day while Wheeling was still dark. In fact, it didn’t matter what the sun proclaimed at all. “Natural time” was dead. Some towns, like Bangor, Maine, and Savannah, Georgia, refused, out of religious faith or plain old stubbornness, to go along. A city like Detroit, perched at the edge of eastern and central times, could not make up its mind, and voted itself, over the course of many years, in and out of both times before settling on its “eastern” designation. For many years people in Detroit would still have to ascertain, in setting appointments, “Is that solar, train, or city time?”

  The 1884 Prime Meridian Conference that set standard time for the world followed the Sunday of Two Noons by less than a year, but the model of standard time with which Allen is associated, that of railroad standardization, played no role. The conference protocols were based on Dowd-like proposals, although Dowd was not named, nor even in
vited to the conference.

  IN 1904, Allen published a small book entitled Standard Time in North America, 1883–1903. The first nineteen pages recapitulate his central role in the standard-time movement (with brief and dismissive mentions of Fleming and Dowd), while the final sixty pages are letters solicited by him from his railroad colleagues, conferring upon him undisputed credit for devising and implementing standard time. “Of all living men you are the one entitled to the credit of inaugurating the system of Standard Time,” wrote one. “I never heard of Mr Chas. F. Dowd in connection with our Standard Time; you were the only person known in the matter to me,” affirmed another. Only Mr. E.T.D. Myers, it seems to me, struck a note both just and historic: “Time was in the air.” It was “in the air,” he goes on to say, the way freedom had been in the air a hundred years earlier. Mr. Thomas Jefferson got the credit for that little revolution, but (like Allen) he was propelled in his course by the tides of history, and by able assistants.