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

Painstaking researched and accessibly written by Clark Blaise, Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming And The Creation Of Standard Time is the scientific history of how one scientist founded the basis for standardized time. The time system developed by Sir Standford Fleming and which was formally adopted in 1884, divided the world into two dozen global time zones and is a system that is utilized by everyone on Earth today. An amazing history of science, politics, nationalism, and one of the great accomplishments of the Victorian Era, Time Lord is a remarkable presentation of how one nineteenth century scientist's ground breaking and accurate measuring of the phenomenon of time and geography has changed the world.

In one of the most fascinating books I have recently read, Clark Blaise discursively recounts the story of Sanford Fleming -- who devoted many years of his life to the creation of a world-wide standard time -- pursuing every congruent topic that he touches on along the way. It is hard to imagine a world without a universally accepted standard for measuring time, and Blaise makes us aware of what the stakes were, both practially and philosophically, when the need for such a standard finally reached critical mass in the late 19th century.Blaise's discursive approach is not to eveyone' s taste -- see the wide discrepancy of rankings this book has received -- but for those who like to follow tangents, it makes for fascinating reading. This book is in many ways a revelation on a subject that we take for granted but that thinking persons should know about: Time and its measurement. If it leads you to seek out other, more traditional narratives on the subject, so much the better. But if this is the only book you read on it, it will stimulate thought on several levels -- and that's not a bad thing.

Those familiar with the "ouvre" (good French-Canadian word, that) of Clark Blaise -- as every serious English-language reader should be -- will recognize "Time Lord" as a natural and welcome extension of the obsessions and inspirations that have provoked him to a uniquely provocative body of work: national, family and historical identity; individual experience as both the expression and foil of cultural expectation; the interchanges and barriers that define the intersection of individual and society; the capricious conditioning of time, context and circumstance; the shocks and epiphanies of travel, education, relationship and experience. In "Time Lord" he is again sort of Canadian, sort of an historian, sort of a homeless vagabond, sort of a philosophical, narrative and autobiographical raconteur. The result is a disjunct, idiosyncratic, consistently engrossing account and reflection of something we take for granted barely a century after its creation -- standard time. Dense with information, insight, connections and broadly-experienced personality, "Time Lord" is much more a temporal, biographical, autobiographical and literary puzzle to be decoded than it is a conventional and linear account of history. And what makes it work, of course, is that Blaise is, as always, a companionable narrator, a careful and thorough researcher wed to an inquisitive intellect, and a frank and unshamedly naked personality. The Canadian readers, who know him well, have made this book a national bestseller, and with good reason.

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.

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