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Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time ReviewAny time you ask "What time is it?" or look at your wristwatch or catch a plane, you are in dept to Sir Sandford Fleming. Who? He is just one of those invisible engineers no one has heard of, but his big idea affects all of us every day. Clark Blaise tells his story in _Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time_ (Pantheon Books).Fleming was born in Scotland, and immigrated to Canada to do surveying. His jobs got bigger and bigger, and he traveled. When he missed a train in Ireland in 1876 because the schedule read p.m. when it should have read a.m., he wondered why, if there are twenty-four hours in the day do we not number them to twenty-four, but assume people can only count to twelve and have to do it twice? It is amazing that no one had had this particular inspiration before, but it was just a starter. For centuries, the world didn't really have a time standardization problem. There was not enough mobility for people to notice that one town's time was not synchronized with another's. Each town had it's own sundial, or an acting astronomer who would compute the meridian of the sun, calculate noon, and fire a gun or run up a flag when the time came. Solar noon moves about twelve miles westward every minute along the most populated parts of North America. Trains moved fast enough to show that meridians were different at every longitude. This not only meant that if you took the train from Boston to New York, you would have to reset your watch. It meant that train companies had to keep track of unimaginably complicated calculations to keep their trains running on time. Each train company kept its own time based on where it's headquarters were, so that in Buffalo, for instance, there were three official times because three railroads served the city; in St. Louis there were six official times.
The climax of the book, and of Fleming's successful thinking on time standardization, came with a series of international conferences, culminating in the 1884 Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. Blaise's description of the conference is great fun, with scientists having to act like diplomats, and those French trying to keep from being humiliated by having to accept a prime meridian in any other country. It was eventually a commercial decision, not entirely what Fleming had planned, and certainly not what the French had wanted. Most shipping was done by navigational charts based on Greenwich, and so the nations voted to make that the prime meridian, although the French abstained and four years later defined their mean time as "Paris mean time, retarded by nine minutes, twenty-one seconds;" this put them in exact accord with Greenwich, without having to mention that detested London suburb.
Blaise has done an outstanding job of bringing some deserved light on Fleming. He has also put some pleasant essays in on how standardizing time affects art and literature, but they are certainly digressions in what is an inspiring story of a man with a good idea and how it changed the world.Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time Overview
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