Time Lord : Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time [Hardcover]

Clark Blaise (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2001

The remarkable story of the man who created and then convinced all the nations of the world to adopt a unified standard for telling time.

Standard Time was one of the crowning achievements of Victorian progressiveness and one of the few Victorian innovations to have survived practically unchanged into our era. Few technological inventions have proven to be both as invisible and as important. Today we take it for granted that the world is divided into twenty-four time zones, but before Standard Time was established in 1884, time was an arbitrary measure decided by individual localities. With the advent of continent-spanning railroads and transatlantic steamers, the myriad local times became a mind-boggling obstacle and the rational ordering of time became an urgent priority.

After laboring for years to create a scientific consensus, Sandford Fleming gathered scientific and political representatives from the world's twenty-five independent nations in Washington, D.C., for the Prime Meridian Conference. There, after considerable rancor, delegates agreed to the Greenwich Prime Meridian, the International Date Line, and a single system by which the entire world would measure its longitudes and tell the same time.

In Time Lord, Clark Blaise introduces us to an almost-forgotten figure, who saw the world as a whole and overcame traditional and national objections to the rational accounting of time.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the 1880s, a businessman traveling by train from New York to Boston needed, on arrival, to adjust his clock, moving it ahead by 12 minutes. The strange increment, writes Clark Blaise, was a matter of local interpretation, some enterprising Bostonian having determined that the rising sun touched the shore of Massachusetts a dozen minutes before warming Manhattan.

Such local interpretations of time made the job of establishing railroad schedules a matter of guesswork and hope, as the Canadian entrepreneur Sandford Fleming discovered when he missed a train in the west of Ireland in 1876. Frustrated, Fleming realized that a new system of universal time would need to be created if railroad travel were ever to realize its full potential. As Blaise writes, "the adoption of standard time for the world was as necessary for commercial advancement as the invention of the elevator was for modern urban development," and nations such as England that had a system of standard time in place owed much of their economic superiority to the predictability and reliability such a system put in place.

Fleming discovered that getting the world onto the same schedule required years of negotiating and browbeating, a nightmare that Blaise ably recounts. Fleming's efforts eventually paid off, and as Blaise writes, "Of all the inventions of the Industrial Age, standard time has endured, virtually unchanged, the longest." His entertaining account of how that came to be will be of appeal to readers who enjoyed Dava Sobel's Longitude, Henry Petroski's The Pencil, and other popular works in the history of technology. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Although he had consulted his guide to Irish railroad travel for the correct time of his train's departure, Sanford Fleming discovered that the train scheduled to depart at 5:35 p.m. would actually depart 12 hours later, at 5:35 a.m. Prior to 1884, conflicts like Fleming's were not unusual since time was not standardized as it is today. Determined to impose a rational order over something so elusive, Fleming, a Canadian engineer and surveyor, turned his attention to the creation of a standard global time based on a 24-hour clock, which he presented to an assemblage of leaders from around the world in 1884 at the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. After much scrutiny and debate, these leaders accepted Fleming's proposal, agreeing that the day would begin at midnight and establishing both the Prime Meridian at Greenwich and the International Dateline. Blaise's splendid account traces Fleming's starring role as the creator of a method of measuring time that rules people's lives even today. Blaise, author of 15 previous books of both fiction and nonfiction (Brief Parables of the Twentieth Century: New and Selected Stories, etc.), presents an important history of ideas and examines how this invisible yet remarkable technological achievement of the Victorian era, a period marked by a dogged confidence in its own capacity for progress, changed the world. Blaise writes with perfect pitch and graceful narrative; his most beautiful chapter explores the ways that writers like Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf manipulated time in their work even as they were constrained by it. (Apr. 20) Forecast: Every popular science book that comes down the pike these days is compared by its publisher to Dava Sobel's Longitude. But this beautiful little book may really follow in Sobel's footsteps. Blaise's six-city author tour (San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago, Iowa City, Seattle and Portland, Ore.) can only help to garner attention.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st Ed. (U.S.) edition (April 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375401768
• ISBN-13: 978-0375401763
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,951,583 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Canadian author Clark Blaise is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and was the director of the International Writing Program. He was one of the founders of the Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group. In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and was the founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University. He is married to internationally acclaimed Indian American author Bharati Mukherjee.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Now You Know What Time It Is, May 10, 2001

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Time Lord : Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time (Hardcover)

Any 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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not Informative Enough, September 3, 2001

By 

Charles Selinske (Rye Brook, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Time Lord : Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time (Hardcover)

As the sub-title carefully indicates, this is neither a full biography of Fleming nor a thorough history of the adoption of standard time. Rather, the best portions describe Fleming's association with the standardization of time in the 1870s and 1880s, especially the global extension of that concept. Unfortunately, not half of the book deals with this subject. The balance is shameless padding including, among many other topics, reminiscences of the author's life and the author's views on Sherlock Holmes, Dreiser's 'Sister Carrie', and 19th and 20th century literature.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A good article, not a book, August 27, 2001

By 

J. J. Kwashnak "voracious reader" (Monroe, LA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Time Lord : Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time (Hardcover)

I too came into Blaise's Tim Lord with the outstanding book Longitude on my mind. While Blaise made some very good points to set the situation up, his failure to realy follow through is disappointing. The author has taken what was at heart a very good article and stretched it out into a thin book. Unfortunately, something had to suffer. It is obvious that the author is impressed by Sanford Fleming, but his fondness is for the whole man's accomplishments, not just Standard Time. So as a result we are treated to a lot of forshadowing of Fleming's role with the trans-pacific cable, but of course since it does not relate to the Standard Time issue, it is left hanging. Some of his observations about time were very interesting, and helped set the whole story in context very well. But then he would go off ruminating about the aesthetics of time, or try to set the whole time issue in the context of Victorian changes and Sherlock Holmes, which was just fluff. It didn't say much. It read like a school child trying to puff up his report so it matches the teacher's minimum requirements. Maybe I'm being harsh because I misread Blaise's thesis, but it seemed that he spent more time on time than on society and the effects of time standardization. The conference itself, setting time zones and the prime meridian is almost anticlimactic in it's place. I came away learning about why we have 24 time zones, why the Prime Meridian is in Greenwich, and that the railroads set their own time for a good part of the 1800's. Other than that, I took very little form this book, and very little about who Sanford Fleming was, outside of someone who missed a train and did something about it. This book could have been so much more.