Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time.(Review)

Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time By Clark Blaise Pantheon Books, 272 pages, $24

When it is noon in Los Angeles, the time in New York City is 3 p.m., and it's eight in the evening in London. As we progress eastwards around the globe, the time changes in neat hourly increments every thousand miles or so, until we reach the International Date Line which traverses the Pacific Ocean, where the day shifts. The fact that the world measures its time in such a well-structured way seems so obvious that few of us pause to think how matters could ever have been different. Global standard time is just there, like the sun and the moon.

Yet of course this organizational framework is far from natural, and in fact was only imposed by a "Prime Meridian Conference" in Washington, D.C. in 1884. Before that, cities and regions controlled their own time on a local, ad hoc basis. For any given community, the point of day at which the sun stood overhead was &dared to be noon, and other hours were calculated accordingly. This state of affairs was fine for a world moving at the speed of horse and rider, but it became thoroughly inadequate following the advent of railroads and steamships.

Just imagine planning to catch a travel connection in Constantinople at, say, 6 p.m. on Tuesday when you had no idea how that city's time structure corresponded to those of neighboring lands. In 1880, the transportation hub of St. Louis had to observe no less than six official railroad times. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the world was experiencing a process of globalization quite as far-reaching and intoxicating as that of our own day. Then as now, problems arising from expanding worldwide communications demanded imaginative solutions.

In the case of standard time, the great innovator was Sir Sandford Fleming (1827-1915), a Scottish-born engineer who undertook surveying work for the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway. Inevitably he encountered the scheduling difficulties arising from different time zones employed across the vast expanse of Canada, and he recognized a crying need for standardization. Fleming became the founder and principal spokesman for the emerging standard time movement that triumphed with the 1884 conference. The result was the system we know today, with 24 time zones, each corresponding to 15 degrees of longitude.

As part of a larger Victorian pattern, Fleming secured a triumph of human-designed order over the natural world. A great strength of Clark Blaise's well-researched and enjoyable biography is ...