by Clark Blaise
Sir Sandford Fleming had passed from the scene when novelists and poets, half a century after the Decade of Time, began agonizing over its dominance, and ways to transcend it. He could have helped Quentin Compson and Nick Adams, and might have understood Yeats and Woolf. His concerns, after all, became their obsessions—how to live in the moment while keeping an eye on eternity. How to live, in short, in a duality of time. The fussy Victorian contrivance that was the Fleming watch-face, taken to its most abstract level, placed its user both in time and in space, both locally and globally, both alone and in community.
He was, finally, just a Victorian. He wanted to tame and to humanize the great adventure of his era, the new reach of speed, power, and distance. He could not have foreseen its legacy, an inheritance of alienation and loneliness.
WHAT WAS A Victorian? A moralist, a reformer, a scientific progressive, probably a racist (although, like Cleveland Abbe, they can pleasantly surprise us), a colonialist, and often an imperialist (but with the best of intentions, as they often qualified it), a religious secularist, an intense (even sentimental) nationalist, probably an unthinking and rather narrow-minded Protestant. (Even Abbe’s tolerance was strained when it came to Catholicism.) Because of their confidence and security, they were grand and glorious forecasters—the future would be like the present, only better. As the always enthusiastic Abbe had written from Russia in 1866: “Every year the world seems to me to be growing smaller and smaller: steamliners across the oceans, Atlantic and Pacific and Mediterranean; railroads across America and Europe; telegraph from San Francisco to San Francisco all the way around. If we do not hitch onto the moon and quarry our granite there it won’t be the fault of the Yankees.”
These Victorians make us feel like visitors to Donald Bar-thelme’s “Tolstoy Museum,” weeping paper streamers from our eyes, weeping for the sheer scale of their achievement, weeping for the world that abandoned them, weeping for the heroic burden of their understandable vanity. So much accomplishment, so much confidence, such touching ignorance.
Fleming’s greatest single achievement in later life, after time had been settled, was his single-minded oversight of the worldwide sub-Pacific cable. In 1902, from his home in Ottawa, he sent two messages to Australia: one via London, the other via Vancouver. The responses were received back in Ottawa some eight hours later after twin circumnavigations of the world, through Fiji and Sydney, then back through India, Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar, and London, a proudly “all-red” route never straying from British soil. It was a miraculous moment—around the world in eight hours (and perfectible to even fewer). It must have reminded him of the moment five years earlier, now infinitely expanded, when he’d sent a message from Ireland to London and received a response an hour later, eight miles down the tracks.
When the cable was finally operating, in 1902, it seemed a miracle, but it would soon be trumped by Marconi’s wireless, leaping the Channel, and then the Atlantic within the decade. His great dream for the cable was imperial unity, the “real time” transmission of political “intelligence” (meaning information). He had shrunk the world in time and in space; all that was now left in his great project of reforming the world was to use the wondrous technologies of the new century to reduce the real costs of distance, and the psychological damage of isolation. To that end, he undertook the destruction of the British cable monopoly, the Eastern Extension Company, in the name of a fair price for the cost of Australian and New Zealand cable transmissions. He could not have foreseen that standard time would help loosen community cohesion and encourage, in time, a kind of rootless anomie. And never could he have imagined the breakup of his beloved British Empire just thirty years after his death.
10
The Prime(s) of Mr. Sandford Fleming
Prime meridian, prime meridian, I’m sick of prime meridian.
—FLEMING (Venice, 1881)
The application of science to the means of locomotion and to the instantaneous transmission of thought and speech have gradually contracted space and annihilated distance. The whole world is drawn into immediate neighborhood and near relationship, and we have now become sensible to inconveniences and to many disturbing influences in our reckoning of time utterly unknown and even unthought of a few generations back.
—FLEMING (1884)
VENICE, 1881; ROME, 1883
IN THE FOUR years between his CPR dismissal and the Prime Meridian Conference, Fleming was not merely “riding the gondolas” of Venice, as Pierre Berton charged. After 1879, when he no longer took his identity from engineering, or the Canadian Pacific Railway, he began working full-time on the two major projects of his life, world standard time, and the worldwide undersea cable. They were, of course, related endeavors—shrinking the world to the speed of new technology, one might say—although they involved distinctly different strategies and different casts of characters.
For standard time, he was writing and delivering papers as a member of the Metrological Society and as chairman of the time convention of the American Society of Civil Engineers. As the Canadian Institute’s delegate to the World Geodesic Conferences in Venice (1881) and Rome (1883), he gave two papers of note that led directly to the calling of the Prime Meridian Conference in 1884.
Standard time, at least for the first few years before he took over a leadership role, seemed blessedly free of politics. His opponents were normally scientists and academics, from whom he could expect a certain level of civility. There were a few testy encounters with the irascibly territorial William F. Allen, but disagreements for the most part were conducted on a suitably elevated plane. And he was fortunate to count Cleveland Abbe as a friend and advisor, a man much like himself who preferred to manage from the wings rather than to take center stage. The exceptions, like the astronomer-royal George Airy, or the eccentric Piazzi Smyth, and even Fleming’s mysteriously dyspeptic archenemy, the Canadian-born head of the U.S. Naval Observatory, Simon Newcomb, offered containable opposition.
At the World Geodesic Congress in Venice in 1881, fellow metrologists, particularly the president of the Metrological Society, Cleveland Abbe, and the president of Columbia University, Frederick Barnard, urged him to propose a conference of diplomats and astronomers to set a prime meridian for the world. President Barnard, a native New Englander then in his late seventies (and, not coincidentally, the figure for whom Barnard College was later named), is the man most responsible for women being admitted to a prestigious university as early as 1890 (the year after his death). His stature is a fair indication of the standard of rationality and passion for reform that the standard time movement attracted. Barnard had been president of the University of Mississippi until 1861, when, being a Union sympathizer, he’d left the South and taken on the presidency of an obscure classical college in New York City and transformed it, Prince Albert-fashion, into a modern university with associated technical colleges, particularly in his specialty of mining engineering. He was a vigorous and effective proponent of time reform, known throughout the world, but a generation older than Fleming, and limited to the role of advocate and theorist.
Cleveland Abbe, a Washington insider, knew that the United States would never initiate a proposal for such a conference. Fleming, for his part, realized that France would never attend a meeting in London. Thus, an intermediary’s role opened for Canada (perhaps for the first, but certainly not the last, time). Fleming’s personal prestige and the wide recognition he enjoyed, as well as his very active chairmanship of the Standard Time Convention of the American Society of Civil Engineers, permitted him, Canadian fashion, a kind of high-level entry to both the United States and Britain. At the 1883 Rome meeting, two years later, the general assembly adopted his motion left over from the Venice congress of 1881. Britain sent notices. President Arthur issued his invitations, and the meeting was formally set for Washington, D.C., to begin on October 1, 1884.
THE POLITICAL opposition to the worldwide cable, Fleming’s final undertaking, was a far different matter from
polite academic disagreement, or even political competition. The cable battles would insert Fleming into the front line of international power politics between Britain and the United States over Hawaii (he felt that the proper diplomacy might have snared Hawaii, or at least one of the chain, for Britain), with the Dutch in Indonesia, the Japanese, and the French in East and North Africa—wherever an undersea cable was forced to surface on foreign-held land. He entered cabinet-level conflicts in every “white” British colony on every continent, supporting autonomous forces against the British-owned communications monopoly, the Eastern Extension Company, and its head, the media baron Sir John Pender. Pender’s monopoly controlled all cable traffic between Europe and the South Pacific, through a network of uncertain concessions won from a host of foreign governments, and set a crippling cost-per-word tariff to recoup a guaranteed 6-percent profit for its inefficient operations. As a result, Australia and New Zealand suffered from a sense of isolation far greater than their distance alone should have imposed.
The challenge to the power of Pender and that of his allies in high places, many of whom were on his payroll, is quite extraordinary, particularly considering Fleming’s preference to act as an unassertive, behind-the-scenes facilitator. Something in Pender brought out Fleming’s confrontational streak, reawakening his dislike for the English power structure, the corruption of monopoly capital, and the abuse of its colonial mandate. Simply to get his proposals considered, Fleming was obliged to work with agents and lobbyists in Washington, paying their fees from his own pocket. It also brought out in Fleming a degree of political commitment that had been missing in his life to date.
His two projects of world time and the world-circling cable, taken together—considering their reach and implication, and the sophisticated and varied approaches they required, the tenacity, commitment, and costs, as well as the organized opposition he encountered—are an extraordinary individual accomplishment. But their undertaking is in keeping with his tragic vision of engineering: when they are completed, the world benefits, and their authorship disappears.
OVER THE YEARS, from his first paper in 1876, he had simplified his time proposals to a core set of twenty, which he summarized at the time of the Venice meeting in 1881 (where, indeed, he and a daughter rode the gondolas). The shadow of his first Toronto paper still hung over the various revisions and improvements—the “cosmic” and “local” day, the system of lettering and numbering of the meridians. But there was no longer a mythical timekeeper in the center of the earth. Instead, there was reference to Z, the as-yet undetermined zero longitude, or the prime meridian. Although he was careful not to hint at his solution, he pointed out how embarrassing and unnecessary the multiplication of national prime meridians was:
For a number of years the question of reducing this number has been under consideration.… The question has been examined by different societies, and various proposals have been submitted, but unanimity with respect to the selection of a prime meridian, to be common to all nations, has in no way been attained. Repeated efforts have been made to gain general concurrence to the adoption of one of the existing national meridians, but these proposals have tended to retard a settlement of the question by awakening national susceptibilities and thus creating a barrier difficult to remove.
Again, those delicate national susceptibilities! Too many primes, but no existing prime—including, presumably, Greenwich or Paris—would do.
The twenty proposals of the Venice paper are worth close attention. The first four state the obvious: there should be a world day. There should be a single meridian with the day to begin on that meridian, and the meridian should be established by the concurrence of all the world’s twenty-six “civilized” (in this case, independent) nations. Proposal number five, however, states: “For reasons elsewhere given it is suggested that the prime meridian and time zero shall be established through the Pacific Ocean, entirely avoiding the land of any nationality.” By the eighth proposal, delegates to the Venice Geographic Conference were asked to approve another item on the Fleming agenda. The twenty-four time zones (“fifteen degrees, or one hour distant from each other”) were to be named according to the English alphabet, omitting the letters I and U. (He had not got around to eliminating U altogether himself, since his sample charts, at least those used in Venice, still employed it.) There were to be two kinds of standard time for the world, “cosmic” and “local.”
Proposal number nine reads:
The unit measure of time, determined as above, shall be held to be a day absolute, and irrespective of the periods of light and darkness which vary with the longitude, to be common to the whole world for all non-local purposes. To distinguish it from ordinary local days, this space of time may be known as the “Cosmopolitan” or “Cosmic Day.” The hours, minutes and seconds of the cosmic day, and the days themselves, may be distinguished by the general term, cosmic time.
Cosmic time, in Fleming’s scheme, was to become the time of science and global communications. The absolute, or cosmic day, the twenty-four hours beginning and ending on the yet-to-be designated prime, would necessarily contradict local times. The cosmic noon, for example, would be any other hour of the day or night at any given location on the globe. “To promote exactness,” Fleming wrote, “it may be employed in astronomy, navigation, meteorology, and in connection with synchronous observations in all parts of the world. It may be regarded as the time which would be used in ocean telegraphy and in all operations of a general or non-local character.” The general public would be spared much contact with cosmic time, except as it touched on cable communications or train travel. The cosmic clock was for professional use, meant to unify the naval and astronomical days (more on that later), and to accommodate meteorologists, like Cleveland Abbe, toiling over the hourly updates of their isothermic and isobaric charts.
Fleming’s apparently casual mention of “ocean telegraphy” is a hidden reference to the proposed Pacific Ocean prime meridian. Without the technology and authority of a modern observatory anywhere near his proposed watery prime, Fleming would be forced to rely on telegraphy from the nearest outpost of civilization (Auckland? Honolulu?) to provide precise time for the entire world. Canadians were well advanced in the use of telegraphy, as were the French and many other European countries, most of whom, by 1881, had standardized their national times to their main national observatories. In the United States, accurate time was sent by signal from observatories to the Western Union Company and the railroads, which in turn sold time signals, usually in the form of time-balls, to cities, industry, and individuals. Time had become a profitable business for otherwise cash-starved observatories, and, of course, for Western Union. (A year’s subscription to the Washington time signal could cost, depending upon the distance from the signal’s source, upwards of $500.)
Time as a commodity was taken very seriously indeed. The Harvard College Observatory, which sent its time signal throughout New England and to the Western Union Company, built its telegraphy room with all the sanitary and climatic controls of a modern silicon-chip room. Leonard Waldo, director of time services for the observatory, and yet another member of the Metrological Society, reported that the instrumentation and telegraphy room was “nearly as practicable free from changes of temperature, with a floor of sheet lead, and walls filled with dry sand, the doors having felt linings.” With such attention to precision having to be taken in the relatively benign precincts of Cambridge (those telegraph lines extended only to Boston, across the Charles River), it does raise serious doubts that any kind of reliable signal could be sent to, or received from, an exposed device in the South Pacific. Thus Fleming’s Pacific prime proposal glossed over an important objection. The only way of placating national jealousies was to deny the Z meridian local access to sophisticated astronomical equipment. It sharpened the delegates’ calculation between the easy choice of Greenwich and the riskier adventure of its nether-arc.
There is, of course, a yet larger calculation that
Fleming had been hinting at all along. In his earliest Toronto paper, with its mythical clock in the center of the earth, or (in theory) hovering in the clouds over it, there was always the suggestion that any prime will do, so long as we free ourselves from a social and historical dependence on local time. The Victorian utopian streak runs throughout Fleming’s proposals, along with the sense that a single universal day is eventually all that is required by an enlightened world citizenry. Local time, like Marx’s state, would eventually fade away.
Fleming’s friends, the academicians and delegates to the 1881 World Geographic Conference in Venice, were well-acquainted with the accuracy and flexibility of telegraphy. For the French, the perfect deployment of technology could serve as a potential anti-Greenwich argument. For scientists in general, electric signaling was the future. It was progressive, it transcended borders, and it was instantaneous. But the conference delegates were political innocents. No one properly foresaw the ingenious objections to remote signaling that would be raised, three years later, by well-trained diplomats representing narrow national interests.
Proposal eleven of Fleming’s twenty returned to dual-track time: “cosmic time” denoted by letters, “local time” by numbers. Proposal twelve spelled it out: “Cosmic time shall be so lettered that the hours will correspond with the twenty-four standard time meridians. When the sun passes meridians G or N it will be G or N time of the cosmic day. When it becomes Z time, that is to say, when the (mean) sun passes the zero meridian, at that moment, one cosmic day will end and another begin.”
