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Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time

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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.

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.

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.

If you are looking for a straightforward and potentially superficial narrative on the history of standard time, Time Lord is unlikely to satisfy. But if you enjoy writers who challenge and delight with bold ideas and stirring insight, Time Lord by Clark Blaise will surely earn a favored spot on your bookshelf. Blaise is no ordinary writer and Time Lord is no ordinary history book. It may not be an easy read throughout, but it is definitely a compelling and rewarding one for any reader who revels in being roused to think and reflect. Rather than take the obvious and well-trodden paths of conventional biographies, Blaise has produced an enlightening treatise on time in a style that is at once literary and accessible. Yes, dates, places, people and events are offered. Sir Sandford Fleming's story is ably told. And wonderful anecdotes are related. "Notes on Time and Victorian Science" is a particularly fascinating chapter, especially in its description of what happened when the telegraph came to outlying Scottish villages in the early 1850s: "Country folk appeared with their messages tightly rolled, imagining they'd be able to jam them, literally, through the copper wires." (It gets even better!) But what Blaise does best is to transport the reader beyond the obvious, providing unexpected insights (personal and historic) on the creation of standard time and its impact on the world around us - including art, literature and, of course, the standardization of train schedules. On first read, "The Aesthetics of Time" would seem to be the most problematic chapter. Although beautifully written, it initially begs the question: does it really belong? On second reading, however, it emerges as the most daring and rewarding chapter, with the potential to forever influence the way you read a classic novel or view a great work of art. Time Lord is a remarkable tour of the Victorian Age and Clark Blaise is a skilled and illuminating guide. It is most definitely worth the journey.

Blaise certainly has an interesting style of writing - but I'm not sure that this is the area where it is best exercised.... I guess I was looking for a more linear account. Blaise seems to detour through all manner of tangential topics before not really getting to a point. At least no point that I was interested in.

After reading this book I'm quite uncertain about Fleming's role in the standardization of time - in fact I get the impression that he was a bit player. Maybe that's not the case, but that's the impression I got from this book.

Not a satisfying read - lots of loose ends and lots of "hints" of more interesting stories that don't quite come out.

I was very disappointed in Blaise's book about Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard time. The book goes into some background about Fleming, which I found very interesting. The point incident that leads Fleming into developing and advocating a Standard Time is also very good. Unfortunately, Blaise loses me by changing the topic to the impact that the railroads had on the Victorian lifestyle, and his pages regarding Sherlock Holmes. I was hoping for more insight into the Prime Meridian conferences, but it didin't happen. I thought Hochschild's 'King Leopold's Ghost' a much better historical book.

Poor Fleming and his contemporaries at the Prime Meridian Conference - they deserve a much better account of their accomplishments than this mess.

There's some great history hidden in this book, including a wonderful drawing of what life was like for a railroad traveler before standard time was established. However, it is totally buried in the author's personal ruminations about time and the railroad's part in cultural history. I suppose this could have been interesting if the author had an engaging and knowledgeable voice - but to be honest, I felt like I was stuck listening to a boring relative go on about his personal theories at a holiday dinner. It also was a bad sign for me when the only time I found these analysis sections interesting was when he was reporting other historian's theories - as soon as he put his take on things, I found the arguments far more wandering, strained and pointless. I am also not heartened to learn, glancing through other reviews, that some of his facts are apparently erroneous.

What a disappointment. I hope someone else takes up this fascinating subject, dusts off the useless analysis, and lets the world discover one of the greatest and most long-lasting inventions of the 19th century with an engaging read.

As a cartographer, I looked forward to reading this book with the same professional interest that I gave Longitude by Dava Sobel. What I discovered was a very thin topic, fattened up with the author's personal observations and weak ties to the era of Fleming.

Ten pages on Fleming and Standard Time in Wired magazine would have been a better use of print.

Oddly, this book is not told in chronological order. The author gives the plot away early and just blabbers on and on. This book will leave you confused over how many plans Flemming had and how, why, when he changed them. The author skips over interesting concepts he should have elaborate on (Time-balls) and blathers on about boring, unrelated time concepts.
I think the best histories are told as stories. The book told me enough to know just how our "The Professor and the Madman" author would have handled the tale. He would have started with the missed train episode and then gone back in time and told it straight through---more or less.
The author discussed issues before his main character was more than just cardboard. Then again, he remained cardboard throughout the book. Why did I ever finish it?

Time Lord is a biography of Sir Sandford Fleming, and the story of his role in the establishment of world standard time in the latter part of the 19th century. Before the advent of world standard time, there was only "local time" - the clocks in the town squares of villages and cities everywhere were calibrated to indicate noon when the sun cast the shortest shadow locally. But rail travelers were confounded with endless time adjustment and conversion charts as they deciphered the railway's timetable. Information, such as weather data, gathered across the country via electric telegraph, required tedious timing adjustments in order to reconcile related events to a common timeline. American railroad leaders responded by establishing a system of US time zones which approximate those used to this day. But Fleming saw the time problem as not just America-wide, but global. His argument for a globe-encircling time system, comprised of a "prime" meridian and twenty-four time zones, was visionary; it not only anticipated the continent-linking undersea telegraph cable, which he saw in his lifetime, but it was in place to support the successor technology introduced by Marconi and all of its familiar descendents, including cell phones, global positioning, supersonic travel, and the internet.
The story moves with fits and starts, with major forays (linkages actually) into numerous other topics including philosophy, art, music and literature. Possibly this author, the former head of an International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, was moved to use this as an opportunity to enlighten and diversify our own thought processes and knowledge. I can only say that if the reader is simply researching the technical history of standard time, then there's a lot of ancillary material to stumble through in this book. But if the reader is more interested in studying the concept of time in general, (of which the idea of standard time represents just one facet) then this author accomplishes that goal in this book and as well provides numerous springboards for the continuation of that study.