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

by Clark Blaise

  Berton’s evocation of the mysterious “Unknown” lends itself to many interpretations; certainly he is referring to a host of problems, some of which were technical in nature, others political, and still others international. In general, anything undertaken by Canada is in some way informed by, accelerated by, or deformed by the the gravitational force of the United States. Like most anxieties, it can fuel ambition, or an extraordinary effort to transcend it.

  Fleming’s response to the aggressive presence of the United States was to resist it through a vigilant eclecticism, and to take from America, when possible, its energy and self-confidence. A sympathetic but fearful outsider like Fleming, looking southward in the early 1870s from his surveying encampment on the prairies, wondered to his friend George Grant if a more humane way of development than the American model of wholesale slaughter of all inconvenient human and animal life could not be found (though he was not overly optimistic). He marveled as well at America’s energy unfolding across the continent, and at Canada’s apparent inability to harness the same enthusiasm.

  IN 1876 Fleming began to interpose himself into the standardtime debate through papers delivered at the Canadian Institute and his membership in a number of American engineering societies. He was no out-of-touch professor from a women’s seminary in upstate New York; he was the friend of the rich and powerful in Montreal, London, New York, and Toronto, yet he still needed instructions on how to behave with the American power structure. Accustomed as he was to “memorializing” the governor-general and gaining royal assent for nearly any enterprise, and coming from a hierarchical society where he enjoyed instant access and prestige, he had to be advised not to depend on official channels. Abbe was his American mentor, and he knew whereof he spoke:

  It is not easy for those high in scientific or official Government positions to impose upon the business world any radical reform; the practical man rejects it as theoretical and the private citizen rejects it as an official impertinence by Government with his personal rights. Any law passed by our Congress would be apt to fall to the ground unless it has the hearty support of the people, the lawyers, and the judges. I doubt whether it is best to spend much time trying to force the American nautical Almanac to adopt the time reform. Better to move through commercial, not political channels.

  In the comparative anarchy that was the United States, the appearance of a government endorsement could have negative effects on popular support. It is a practical lesson that Fleming immediately applied. He became something of a demon spokesman at chambers of commerce, cultivating dozens of such organizations in Canada, the United States, and, eventually, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia.

  Let me return, in some detail, to his first paper, “Uniform Non-Local Time (Terrestrial Time),” which was delivered before the Canadian Institute in November 1876, just three months after his return from Ireland. Like a first novel, it is rife with autobiographical elements. There’s the recent Bandoran experience, the autodidact’s historical research, and the idealist’s impossible schemes. It is the ur-manuscript from which he drew all subsequent (and far simpler) refinements, but it shows that the idea for world time, which he later called “cosmic time,” was with him full-blown from the beginning. It shows that Fleming’s proposals owe nothing to Dowd, Abbe, or Allen. Truly, “time was in the air,” and in ways that neither Mr. Myers nor Mr. Allen, nor even Professor Dowd, suspected.

  The paper was divided into five parts. First came “the difficulties arising from the present mode of reckoning time,” in other words, a world with too many times is a world without time at all; the familiar descriptions of “natural” and “conventional” divisions of time came second; third, a history of systems of time-reckoning, ancient and modern. It is the fourth and fifth sections, called “The importance of having ‘Uniform time’ all over the world” and “The practicability of securing all the advantages of uniformity, while preserving existing local customs,” that concern us here and open directly into a universe both familiar and alien. Call it Victorian modernism.

  Time and space were the true identities: twenty-four hours for the clock, twenty-four meridians dividing the earth. Why the hypothetical chronometer? It functioned as an impersonal time god, a kind of hyper-time. Fleming described the new hours:

  They ought not to be considered hours in the ordinary sense, but simply twenty-fourth parts of the mean time occupied in the diurnal revolution of the earth. Hours, as we usually refer to them, have a distinct relation to noon or to midnight at some particular place on the earth’s surface; while the time indicated by the Standard Chronometer would have no special relation to any particular locality or longitude: it would be common and equally related to all places; and the twenty-four sub-divisions of the day would be simply portions of abstract time.

  From his first paper on time-reckoning, Fleming was trying to separate the physical reality of time from the socially and psychologically constructed reality of hours. The numbered hours (“Six P.M., is dinner ready?” “Six A.M., have you done your chores?”) are difficult to separate from local considerations—that is, from local or natural time—unless we change their names and our habits of association. Calling five P.M. by its new name of seventeen hours would help, but it was not enough. By proposing the concept of “abstract time,” the hypothetical regulator set in the middle of the earth (or in the clouds), he was attempting to liberate time from specific locations:

  The standard time-keeper is referred to the centre of the earth in order clearly to bring out the idea, that it is equally related to every point on the surface of the globe. The standard might be stationed anywhere, at Yokohama, at Cairo, at St Petersburg, at Greenwich or at Washington. Indeed, the proposed system if carried into force, would result in establishing many keepers of standard time, perhaps in every country, the electric telegraph affording the means of securing perfect synchronism all over the earth.

  The evocation of the telegraph—exact, instantaneous, and man-made—rather than the sun as a regulator of time marks Fleming as the protomodernist he was. It also alerted the French, who were more advanced in the applications of telegraphy to time than anyone else, to the presence of a man they felt they could work with.

  The invisible, imagined, omnipresent “time-keeper” bears a strong resemblance to other Victorian deistic constructions. It, or He, is the invisible regulator of human affairs, otherwise tucked away and invisible. In short, Fleming was proposing a single time for the entire world, to be called “terrestrial” time or “universal time,” so that when one’s timepiece read “G.05,” all timepieces in the world would register the same G hour. (It would not be G everywhere, of course; but every location on earth would know, as we know today by consulting the front pages of our telephone books, what time it is, relative to ourselves, anywhere else in the world.) If a train were departing at L.15, it would signify that it was leaving, relative to G.05, in four hours and ten minutes (no J, remember), and it would not matter if G were a morning hour and L an afternoon, since A.M. and P.M. were notations of the past. You were located both where, and when. Time and place were identities.

  (In the theory’s next incarnation, in 1878, Fleming proposed a modification of his twenty-four-hour clock. The hours from midnight to noon would read one through twelve, as they do now, but the P.M. hours would be marked by letters, starting with the same time-zone letter where one happened to be residing. Greenwich was Z, so that much of eastern North America, five zones earlier than Greenwich, was designated as U. Again, Fleming’s pedagogical purpose was to fuse time and longitude, eliminating the social aspect of time. By 1880 his next revision had abandoned an East Coast landfall, and the Greenwich meridian as well.)

  “Every traveller having a good watch,” he wrote, “would carry with him the precise time that he would find employed everywhere. Post meridiem could never be mistaken for ante meridiem. Railway and steamboat time-tables would be simplified, and rendered more intelligible, to the generality of mankind t
han many of them are now.” M.05 means merely that it is five minutes past the M hour, which follows L and leads to N. It is not important to know what the letters correspond to in old-style numbered hours, since communications and schedules would only appear in the new style. One schedule would fit all listings, in all localities. There would be a separate reckoning for local time, which he did not propose eliminating—he just wanted to eliminate local time for any calculation beyond a strictly local application.

  How would it work, practically? Or, more precisely, how would it look?

  If a gentleman living in Philadelphia were to send a telegram to a relative in London announcing the very moment of his child’s birth, in ways that would be mutually comprehensible, it might read as follows:

  My dear brother Basil: At U:22 today 17 January 1881 our son Algernon Augustus III was born. (signed) A. A. Smith, Jr.

  By such means, Uncle Basil in London, receiving the cable at Z:50, turns his watch face and learns that his bonny nephew was born a mere twenty-eight minutes earlier (in “real” or “universal” time). But without the meridional calculation, the time of transmission from Philadelphia, 3:22 P.M., would have no readily translatable equivalent to London’s 8:50 P.M. By 9:00 P.M., Uncle Basil might cable his congratulations back to Philadelphia, where it arrives at, say, 4:00 P.M., local time. But the familial dignity of the occasion, and the technological achievement, would be obscured—literally—by the mutually unintelligible numbers.

  Wouldn’t it be more reassuring, more conducive to human understanding, for Algernon to receive Basil’s wire at U:00 and know that his loving brother had responded to the news at Z:00, only minutes after having received it? As Frederick Barnard, the President of Columbia University, had noted at the 1882 meeting of the Metrological Society:

  Mr. Fleming had caused to be constructed a watch to illustrate the proposed system. On the dial the hours ran from one to twenty-four, and surrounding the dial was a movable ring bearing the letters representative of cosmic time. By bringing the letters corresponding to any of the twenty-four standard meridians to the hour twenty-four, the watch will show instantly both the local time of that meridian and also the cosmic time.

  (It may seem a simple-enough technology, another Victorian gauge, but it would disclose at a glance—and a twist of the wrist—one’s local time relative to the time at any place in the world. The results would replace the bulky maps and notations, but the impulse anticipates today’s cell-phone technology, which seeks a wireless connectedness at the flick of a button, for many of the same human and commercial reasons.)

  Fleming was now through four of his topics (I’ve focused mainly on the fourth), but the fifth was, potentially, even more unsettling. In fact, it touched on a central conflict that would not be resolved until the Prime Meridian Conference in 1884, and then only in rancor. Part five: How to extend the advantages of standard time at sea?

  “Navigators are required to employ a standard time to enable them from day to day, when on long voyages, to compute their longitude,” Fleming began. The trouble, of course, lay in the multiplicity of prime meridians. Each ship derived its time from the prime meridian of the national observatory in the country of its registry. There were eleven national prime meridians—Paris, Greenwich, Rio, St. Petersburg, Rome, Lisbon, Cádiz, Berlin, Tokyo, Copenhagen, and Stockholm—from which ships derived their bearings at sea. Ships from different nations passing at sea could not communicate the location of mutual dangers, since British (and American) ships drew their charts and astronomical observations (their ephemerides) from a Greenwich prime, which was unintelligible to ships of other nationalities. The terrestrial marker proposed by Fleming would eliminate diverse meridians in favor of a single one, and, as he had already indicated, it really didn’t matter which meridian that might be. (All nations, however, had to agree to it.) Yokohama or Greenwich, it was all the same, so long as it was consistently applied by ships of all nations.

  The problem with Fleming’s time proposals, even after he’d simplified them and done away with the imaginary time monitor in the center of the earth, and the dual-track clock-face, always lay with finding a universally acceptable prime meridian. All meridians were equal, they all measured the same rotation of the earth that we call a day—but some meridians were culturally and commercially more equal than others. Left to a popular vote, Greenwich would doubtless win, since 90 percent of the world’s shipping already employed it. Even the American railroads, as well as the country’s military and commercial fleet, ran on Greenwich time. But popularity alone did not necessarily recommend Greenwich to Fleming; quite the contrary, in fact, since the British meridian, as we have seen, lacked the neutrality he considered essential to a truly universal solution.

  What Fleming proposed would be considered revolutionary, even today. Of course there would be a twenty-four-hour clock. There would be two time-tracks: local (such as we have today), designated by numbers; and terrestrial (which would regulate all maritime and continental rail activity and all communications), designated by letters. This, too, if we think of the airlines’ Zulu time, based on Universal Coordinated Time, we have adopted for technical use. And here, Fleming remains our contemporary. Clearly, we are moving toward a single, uniting time. (The Swatch company, Swiss watchmakers, have even proposed an Internet Time that is also universal, allowing users in various parts of the world to bypass time zones and rendezvous in the same “real” time.)

  That is, many millions need a local time for setting their dental appointments or movie starts, but otherwise live within a computer-driven universal standard of time. Cosmic time in the 1870s was a giant scheme for the capturing of real time. Telegrams would be sent at, say, M.13 and arrive at T.22, and both the sender and receiver would know precisely when they had been received. A telegram sent from London to, say, Denver, would show an apparent lapse of seven hours, and a few minutes. Actually, the two times are occurring at the same “cosmic” instant. The actual local time, either of transmission or reception, was irrelevant. Cleveland Abbe would not have to translate those dozens of weather-data telegrams into Washington time.

  In 1876 Fleming had yet to work out the role of Greenwich (if any) in his universal scheme; hence that hypothetical timekeeper in the center of the earth. Clearly, given its “popularity,” the Greenwich meridian could not be ignored in any eventual calculation. The challenge was how to make use of the Greenwich meridian without involving England. An interesting intellectual puzzle, and in 1878, when Fleming returned in earnest to the question of standard time, he came up with a suitably elegant solution. When is Greenwich not Greenwich? The answer is simple: when it is the “anti-prime” of Greenwich—not the zero degree of Greenwich, but the one hundred and eightieth degree, the continuation of the Greenwich meridian on the far side of the earth. In other words, Greenwich is not Greenwich—though it keeps all the ephemerides of Greenwich—when the anti-prime (or the “nether arc”) cuts through “the unpopulated Pacific and over the icy steppes of Siberia,” affecting no one, more or less, and arousing no national susceptibilities. The Colonial Office was suitably impressed, the papers were translated and circulated to the world’s astronomers, and Fleming was invited to deliver the paper to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, meeting that year in Dublin—and waited and waited, unsummoned.

  A veiled demand for intellectual restitution is inherent in all of his succeeding papers, as well as in his final CPR engineer’s report of 1879, in which he announced the idea of a sub-Pacific cable linking London through Canada to Australia. Railroads were fast, but the cable was faster, and Fleming had caught the fever of instantaneous connection. Railroads, he noted, were composed of two distinct technologies, the rails and the telegraph. They followed one another, and in fact rails could not function adequately without the telegraph. But cables were infinitely faster and more adaptable. The moment had come, now that the rails were in sight of the ocean, to continue the cables under the Pa
cific, just as they had already crossed the Atlantic. Vancouver would be connected to Fiji and Australia, Australia with India and South Africa. A glance at any map confirmed the fact that the red patches on the earth, the British Empire, fairly begged for connection. Without abandoning standard time, he would now take up the final great scheme of his life, the laying of the trans-Pacific and worldwide, all-British cable.

  His vision had always been one of one-world and instantaneous communication. The time zones were but a rough sketch of what he next planned to do. What good is time if it can’t be put to work?

  IN 1895 Sandford Fleming, then sixty-eight years old and on the brink of achieving the great success for which he would be knighted two years later, was visiting County Mayo, Ireland. He was in Britain to check on the funding and the progress of his trans-Pacific cable. Of a small encounter that followed, he wrote:

  On my journey in a jaunting car from Newport to Blacksod Bay at a wayside post office I telegraphed to a friend in London and proceeded on our way. In about an hour a woman appeared at the door of another wayside office. She hailed our car, and enquiring for a person bearing my own name, she placed in my hands a reply from my friend in London. The message I sent about eight miles back had crossed Ireland, the Irish Channel, Wales and England. It found my friend in the great city of London, and a reply was received in little more than an hour after I despatched my message, and the whole cost to me was sixpence. It was a marvel to me. Geographically I was in a remote corner of a country where I was entirely unknown, and I discovered myself telegraphically with my friends in London. Ever since my visit to Blacksod Bay I have had visions of the extension of the use of the electric telegraph and have regarded it as a heaven sent means of communication. I have asked myself the question can we bring the Dominion telegraphically as near England as Ireland and Scotland are today? Can we bring the whole worldwide British Empire telegraphically into one neighborhood?