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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
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.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not Informative Enough, September 3, 2001
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.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A good article, not a book, August 27, 2001
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.
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