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

by Clark Blaise

  Miraculous as it must have seemed at the time, it is about as far as the marriage between steam and electricity can be pushed. The coordinated efforts involved, brought into focus that day, are also indicative of the mechanical disadvantage of steam technology, then entering its unacknowledged decline. The diesel engine had been invented two years earlier, the telephone was already widely in use, and the compact power of electricity was all the rage, from incandescent lights to the phonograph, oscillating fans, and motion pictures. Mr. Marconi’s wireless transmissions would leap the Channel just a year after the worldwide cable was up (or, more properly, down) and running. (The wireless would bridge the Atlantic within the decade.) Had Fleming been listening, he might have heard scurrying sounds, primitive mice under the dinosaurs’ feet.

  8

  Riding the Rails

  THERE IS NO aspect of human activity, from law and medicine to economics and aesthetics that was not permanently altered by the encounter with our golem and faithful servant, the steam locomotive. We are fond of saying that the railroad “tamed the West,” that it civilized the world, but there is a rakish counternarrative. Railroads emboldened us. The distant whistle fed our dreams, our hunger, made us, by prevailing standards, wanton. Its power knew no limit, and the power was transferable, right up the spine of the Victorian passenger. The problems they encountered learning to tame their master/slave—the speed, their dependency, the ecological damage—are our problems, too.

  When speed becomes a consideration in all everyday decisions, it can be as unsettling, socially and psychologically, as speed in any athletic competition. Civil engineers, true to Sandford Fleming’s description—the straighteners and levelers—had obliterated many of the irregularities of nature. The newly invented motorcar broke the hundred-mile-an-hour barrier in competition by the turn of the century. It is the perception of movement on all fronts, like skittering pond life, that defined the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, and it is the railroad that lends itself as the single most conspicuous symbol of the Industrial Age.

  The railway journey (to echo the title of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s great social history of nineteenth-century railway travel) was a microcosm of all nineteenth-century philosophical and aesthetic debates. What is vision, what is reality, what social structures can withstand the assault of speed, what are the fixed polarities of time and space? Who are our friends? What degree of distance is advisable? If the brain were indeed equipped with innate categories of time and space, as European philosophers contended, then the railroad represented a fundamental challenge to reality. The inner clock of the European psyche became unbalanced. How much of that imbalance expressed itself as hysteria and neurasthenia in the nerve clinics of early psychiatry? Schivelbusch points out that so-called “railroad spine,” a host of symptoms without a definable cause—anxiety, sleeplessness, headache, loss of appetite, a generalized dread—yielded more to psychiatry than to traditional medicine, boosting the prestige of a field of study that had been notably lagging in popular esteem.

  Even social etiquette came up for revision. In England, the easy camaraderie and crude democracy of the stagecoach that had led to those raucous Tom Jones moments of shared food and drink, and even to learning the coachman’s name, never carried over to the railroad compartment. The reason, initially, was fear, and for good reason. Accidents, derailments, and general discomfort were common in the early years. One rarely chats or shakes hands on a roller coaster.

  And there is another reason, one that reaches by analogy into the standard-time debate. The early European rail compartment was essentially, even to its velvet plush, a traveling coffin. No way in, or out, except through the individual door leading to the platform, and no circulation through the carriage between compartments. No on-board facilities. Heating was imperfect. We might even extend the metaphor to a kind of No Exit: purgatorial entombment with six cigar-smoking gentlemen, some, doubtless, with food and drink, reading their newspapers. No introductions, no stated common backgrounds or purpose. The first generation of European railway compartments were a chamber of horrors, a mode of speeded-up transport, but not yet a traveling experience (or as we’d say today, not yet a “culture of transportation”). Trains and passengers had not interiorized enough of the outer world—its sights, sounds and patterns of mobility—to make rail travel anything other than a disorienting hell on wheels.

  The early years of European passenger-coach design exposed the central flaw in “natural” thought. Simply put, “natural” thinking failed to comprehend that a change in speed could not be separated from systemic upheaval, psychic rebellion. Railway carriage design in Europe owed much to the preexisting model of the stagecoach, but stagecoach atavism in an era of steam power was like repressive rule in a time of rising liberation. Speed and confinement are incompatible, except perhaps on a roller coaster. By the time the fear of speed and power was overcome (and adjustments, like the communicating corridor, were installed), a European railway etiquette of noncommunication had already evolved. Hence, the avoidance of contact, the sparse sociability, and the need (literally) for face-obscuring reading material.

  In 1848 (in the wake of standardization along the Great Western), a newspaper vendor at Euston Station, Mr. W. H. Smith, began renting books to Birmingham-bound passengers. For little over a penny, they could take a book on board from his well-stocked library, read it, and then return it to his stand at the Birmingham terminus. Thus was a literature born, an extremely standardized literature, the so-called penny-dreadful, which took its place beside inexpensive editions of popular novels of the day. In France, Louis Hachette did the same, but on a grander scale, and soon British publishers were issuing special series of “literature for the rail.”

  Just as W. H. Smith adopted standardization for his lending library as soon as a common standard of time was struck throughout England, so did standardization encourage a unitary vision of culture, a shared cosmopolitanism across Britain and the continent. As early as 1838, ten years into the rail revolution, magazines were discussing the shrinking of time and space, and that the “national hearth” (meaning London) was now two-thirds closer than it had been to any of its citizens. Rails sped passengers along five times faster than the fastest stagecoach, which is a prescription for social hysteria, or another way of saying that perceived distances shrank by a factor of five. Schivelbusch quotes Heinrich Heine’s almost rhapsodic 1843 embrace of the railroad’s potential:

  What changes must now occur, in our way of looking at things, in our notions! Even the elementary concepts of time and space have begun to vacillate. Space is killed by the railways, and we are left with time alone.… Now you can travel to Orléans in four and a half hours, and it takes no longer to get to Rouen. Just imagine what will happen when the lines to Belgium and Germany are completed and connected up with their railways! I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door.

  And for every Heine, there was a John Ruskin who remembered the stagecoach and detested every minute of rail travel. In the Quarterly Review he railed (so to speak) against “the loathsomest form of deviltry now extant, animated and deliberate earthquakes, destructive of all nice social habits or possible natural beauty.”

  Both sides of the debate could easily project a time in the near future, for better or worse, when the entire nation would be one continuous city. Railroad travel rearranged social interaction, it stole the passenger’s presumed autonomy. It forced upon him new ways of looking out a window (so as not to develop motion sickness). Instruction manuals taught him how to behave, how to safeguard his valuables, when not to initiate conversations. All new modes of travel and communication are briefly infantilizing, and railroads were no exception.

  Much like today’s generation, split between the computer-literate and unskilled labor, attitudes toward the railroad defined classes and generations. Flaubert wa
s famously bored to distraction by railways, and Ruskin felt himself mishandled like a package, not served as a client. Others, however, took to the trains and welcomed the breakdown of barriers, even of landscape and all that was pictorial in nature, as a confirmation of the world as a unified, mental, symbolic reality. In 1848, in Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens, no early admirer of railways and their relentless gorging, like rampant brontosaurs on country lanes and urban neighborhoods, nevertheless honored their power, even their redemptive ability, in one extraordinary chapter, “Mr. Dombey Goes Upon a Journey.” Dombey enters the train a defeated, near-suicidal wreck of a man. He alights, buoyed in spirit, freshly confident. Chapter Twenty is fiction of a high social-psychological acuity. Mr. Dombey, a wealthy industrialist, while preparing to board his train is accosted by Mr. Toodle, a “coalraker,” whose wife had been in service to the Dombeys. Mr. Dombey assumes he’s about to be touched up by Toodle for a handout.

  “Your wife wants money, I suppose,” said Mr. Dombey, putting his hand in his pocket, and speaking (but then he always did) haughtily. “No thank’ee, Sir,” returned Toodle, “I can’t say she does. I don’t.” Mr. Dombey was stopped short now in his turn: and awkwardly: with his hand in his pocket. “No, Sir,” said Toodle, turning his oilskin cap round and round; “we’re a doin’ pretty well, Sir; we haven’t no cause to complain in the worldly way, Sir. We’ve had four more since then, Sir, we rubs on.”

  In other words, as Thomas Arnold had noted, “feudality is gone for ever.”

  In sociological terms, the class system was changing, and the mighty railroad was the cause. In psychological terms, Mr. Dombey enters his train compartment depressed:

  He found no pleasure or relief in the journey. Tortured by these thoughts he carried monotony with him, through the rushing landscape, and hurried headlong, not through a rich and varied country, but a wilderness of blighted plans and gnawing jealousies. The very speed at which the train was whirled along, mocked the swift course of the young life that had been borne away so steadily and so inexorably to its foredoomed end. The power that forced itself upon its iron way—its own—defiant of all paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle, and dragging living creatures of all classes, ages, and degrees behind it, was a type of the triumphant monster, Death.

  Later in the journey, after his dark night of the soul, he comes to a tentative conclusion:

  As Mr. Dombey looks out of his carriage window, it is never in his thoughts that the monster who has brought him there has let the light of day in on these things not made or caused them. It was the journey’s fitting end, and might have been the end of everything; it was so ruinous and dreary.

  All of which—the night aboard the train, absorbing his own kind of energy-transfer—permits him to rise the next morning “like a giant refreshed,” and to conduct himself at breakfast “like a giant refreshing.”

  By the end of Dombey’s nine hundred pages, we feel that the author has likewise made his peace with the sheer brute majesty of the iron rails. Locomotion is the life force, and it is death; it is fate itself. Dickens might have wanted to pose as a Romantic poet or a Tory lord of a manor, and he would have loved to condemn all that destroyed nature and history, but he’s Dickens; he cannot. He realized railways would bring life where previously there had been only despair and darkness. And just as surely, they will kill—famously, Anna Karenina and the eponymous hero of Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case”—anyone who just can’t adjust.

  Railroads rewrote the law. Was the rail a “road” like a turnpike or canal, open to public use upon the paying of an appropriate fee? No, it wasn’t. The British Parliament decided very early that the “rail-way” was something new and different. The right of way as well as the rolling stock could be deemed private property. Could they affect our health? The litany of physical complaints reads today like post-traumatic shock, and that exactly is what railroad travel was in the mid-nineteenth century, an uprooting of everything familiar, every notion of the tolerable, every received notion of time and space.

  Eyes attuned to the pace and intimate perspective of the stagecoach were cautioned not to scrutinize roadside attractions but to focus on distant objects, the tallest tree, the church steeple or ruined castle, in order to avoid nausea, or worse, a disorientation that could lead to madness. Passengers had to develop “panoramic vision” to compensate for the disorienting fragmentation and treacherous glimpses of a blurred foreground. Inhabited landscapes, viewed from the moving train, dissolved into a series of blurs, mere impressions, shadows in doorways, distant shapes bent in fields, two-dimensional glimpses instead of long, per-spectival approaches. This, as we shall see, fueled new aware-nesses, new expectancies.

  A WHOLE way of life had passed, as Victorian diarists were fond of noting, a slower time of luxury and sociability, a chance to know the intimate landscape from the stagecoach window, when they swayed to the natural undulation of the horse. Obliterating inventions—the railroad over the stagecoach, the automobile over the railroad, the typewriter over elegant handwriting, the computer over the typewriter—often unleash such sentimental reveries. Who wouldn’t prefer a train, a sailboat, a bicycle, or cross-country skis to some jet-powered or motorized contrivance? Or a distinctive handwritten note from a fountain pen, to some standardized, ill-composed e-mail?

  We want more speed but we resent, or at least lament, the elimination of the slower and, arguably, finer, more graceful experiences they replace. Railroad buffs, vintage-auto owners, beer- and wine-makers, fly-tying anglers, gardeners—they are the “temporal millionaires,” who can afford to spend conspicuous amounts of time indulging their fancies, living partially in the past.

  The rest of us buy upgrades on planes or trains in hopes of restoring a touch of glamour, a bit of slower time, to an otherwise uncomfortable experience. For a stiff supplemental charge we can imbibe again a whiff of Orient Express or Titanic luxury, a bit of celebrity status the way Hollywood stars used to wave coming down the airplane stairways as though they were political leaders. We can share a drink in the club car with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, or conduct black-market business like Joseph Cotten, face-to-face, cigarette-to-cigarette, with Harry Lime in the cold, cramped space between the railroad cars in gritty postwar Vienna. Is that Bogart and Bergman on the tarmac, Claude Rains watching with a smirk? It wasn’t so long ago that all the drama, romance, and comedy of America was tied up in trains, from Preston Sturges to Billy Wilder, all sung to the tune of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.” And the reason for that, I suspect, was because automobiles and airplanes had already “framed” trains, made them a site of memory and nostalgia, no longer a principal mode of conveyance.

  STEAM TECHNOLOGY was about more than speed, power, and punctuality. Steam transformed more than the landscape. Steam was hot, loud, smoky, smelly, and dangerous, but there was also something intuitive about its working, and its direct successor, the internal combustion engine. One can imagine the 1850s version of the 1950s teenage grease-monkey, working on a steam engine, polishing, oiling, improving its efficiency. The leap from a James Watt to a Gottlieb Daimler or a Henry Ford is not unimaginable.

  Steam was sophisticated, but apprenticeable. Unlike electricity, it was visible, a celebration of practice over theory. With steam, mountains could be bored and harbors dredged. Rivers were crossed, ships’ designs turned from wood and sail to steel and iron, hold capacities and passenger cabins expanded a hundredfold, with a need to fill their holds with thousands of tons of coal for ocean passage. Meticulous planning and astronomical start-up costs entered the calculation for any new enterprise, and London and Continental banks oversaw bond issues for projects that might have seemed fanciful only a generation earlier: undersea cables, new shipyards, new steel mills, new mining equipment; transcontinental railroads spanning Canada, South Africa, America, India; telegraphs down the African coast. The new technology ran on coal, on more coal than traditional method
s could ever extract. Workers had to be at least semiskilled just to handle the demands of the new technology, and, in the end, many grew sufficiently confident to challenge ancient wisdom, or to suggest shortcuts to greater efficiency. Quite a few, like the men who created time, learned enough on the job to become engineers themselves.

  The traditional country blacksmith by his forge, the carter, the carpenter, required skills, but no skill that could not be passed on by way of apprenticeship. Imprecision was part of their rustic charm, and no one was seriously affected by minor imperfections. Until the 1830s, as Thomas Huxley and others pointed out, technological improvement and the velocity of events, the perceived speed of living, had lain dormant since the Renaissance. The economy was land, textiles, and agriculture. Imports and exports were triangle trades, carried on mostly by means of sailing ships, within the empire.

  The technology of steam created the need for civil engineers to supervise the construction of tunnels, the laying of track, the deepening of harbors, and the analysis of subsoils for ever-heavier bridges—every practical application of engineering skills and applied physical and natural science. It needed mechanical engineers to set the minute tolerances and to oversee the manufacture of turbines and machine tools and to establish standard weights and measurements, and mining engineers to improve coal extraction, and metallurgical engineers to oversee new modes of steelmaking. Steam was an unforgiving power source: any weakness, any miscalculation, any misreading of the dozen or more temperature and pressure gauges could result in disaster. Stronger metals were needed, metals forged at higher temperatures, from purer ores, with experimental additives. The need for engineers directly benefited the middle classes and the great urban universities in London, Glasgow, and Manchester, not the aristocracy, whose sons headed for the prestigious universities and the more traditional professions.