Time Lord (12 page)

Missing that train, though it cost him sixteen hours and, as he put it, “monumental vexation,” turned out to be the luckiest misfortune in his very lucky life. Had it happened a year or two earlier, it might have ended with an angry letter, or a snappish aside in his daybook. But in June 1876, while on a year’s “medical sabbatical” from the CPR, he was a gentleman of unaccustomed leisure. And so, as he thought the problem over, he concluded that the error was more than a microscopic misprint. It was the opening into an industrial underworld of fallacy and inefficiency. Correcting it was not an editorial step; it was an abstract engineering project. The waste of his sixteen hours was a small instance of the world’s daily loss from the retention of an outmoded system of time notation. Simple misprints were unavoidable and inevitable, of course—but in a larger sense, this particular error was
not
correctable, at least not under present conditions. The whole system of numbering was wrong; it alone accounted for the bedeviling misprint of the Latin abbreviation. Why should modern societies adhere to ante meridiem and post meridiem, why double-count the hours, one to twelve, twice a day? Are we so stupid that we cannot compute above the number twelve?

IN
1876 Fleming himself was in a precarious position that perhaps even he did not fully comprehend, and certainly did not admit. He had begged from Parliament a few months earlier, and been granted, a year’s medical leave. He’d cited a “near fatal” accident that had put him on crutches for several months. The accident from which he was recovering has never been identified, although a serious injury sustained on a surveying mission five
years earlier had led to liver and bowel damage, opiate treatment, and two weeks in bed. Neither injury is mentioned in
Empire-Builder
.

His Ben Franklin-inspired worldview had never allowed for much in the way of doubt, hesitation, or morbid introspection. At forty-nine, the ever-upward, ever-busier public-service career of the most distinguished Canadian of his age was three years from ending, and his “sabbatical” would stretch onward for forty more years. Fleming’s journals are useful sources for documenting travel, income, and expenses, the births of children and deaths of friends and family, but they very rarely indulge in self-analysis. The injury for which he requested recovery time does not appear to be physical in nature, but rather, a nervous crisis, a loss of confidence, perhaps the most wounding injury he could have suffered.

He was losing control of the CPR mission. It was a greater undertaking than any one man could master under the conditions imposed by Parliament, especially upon an engineer still involved with the earlier and smaller Intercolonial. He was a civil servant, answerable to elected officials, a chief in name only. Funding came from Parliament. His salary, though generous for the times, was that of a government official—and this in the era of the railroad barons, the Cornelius Vanderbilts and James J. Hills. Canada itself was only nine years old in 1876; the lines of parliamentary authority were still being drawn, and partisan hatreds virtually guaranteed continual chaos. Adding to pressures not of Fleming’s making, Alexander Mackenzie, the Liberal Party leader, had promised the leaders in distant British Columbia a transcontinental Canadian railroad within ten years of confederation—on the threat of their opting out of the agreement and going it alone, or, worse, joining the United States.

The two founding political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, and their leaders, Mackenzie and John A. Macdonald, quarreled over every surveying decision Fleming rendered.
Mackenzie, a stonemason by trade, could, without apologies, be called flinty and gravelly; his constituents were the small farmers of Ontario. Macdonald enjoyed the support of the Montreal (English) business community, the establishment, and the crown-appointed governor-general. When not in his cups, he could be a charming and effective leader. Fleming, however, was not accustomed to second-guessing by any uninformed outsider, nor to tailoring his surveys to satisfy a pool of constituents and powerful supporters. To a politician, rewarding loyal backers with the promise of a rail line was instinctual behavior. What might look on paper as a modest expenditure became for Fleming a burden to be amortized over fifty years, requiring new surveys over untested soils and river crossings, and new crews and more provisions, especially in the face of a dependably long and harsh winter, that could run into millions of dollars. Approving political requests against engineering judgment was a violation of his professional commission as a civil engineer.

Lost, perhaps, in all the in-fighting was a simple human fact: Fleming alone had been asked to do in ten years what had taken scores of specialists nearly sixty-five years to accomplish in the United States. Canada’s knowledge of its own far west in 1872, when the surveys finally got under way—particularly the mountain ranges of interior British Columbia and the most promising passes through them, as well as the costs and strategy for filling and bridging the swamps of the Canadian Shield—was hardly greater than President Thomas Jefferson’s had been in 1803 when he appointed Lewis and Clark to survey the vast new lands of the Louisiana Purchase. Fleming undertook the surveys, camping out through summers and winters, consulting trappers and Indians, all the while taking notes on weather, water, soils, plants, and wildlife. He was surveyor, naturalist, scout, meteorologist and geologist, as well as the country’s leading civil engineer.

Now, on his medical absence from Ottawa, the twin engineering assignments on the two rail projects were being handled by
crew chiefs of varying competence but uniform ambition. Questions of his competence and even of his probity were being raised in Parliament, and his faithful friends and defenders—he was a man to engender deep loyalty—were finding themselves politically vulnerable. Fleming himself, although a personal friend of John A. Macdonald’s (the irascible Mackenzie had few intimates), prided himself as a civil servant on never having voted, nor of ever having uttered a partisan comment in public. The effect of his aloofness was to render himself increasingly expendable.

The missed train, then, occurred when Fleming had the time and an unaccustomed release from the contentious minutiae of engineering to contemplate theoretical change, and it led within hours to an immediate solution—a twenty-four-hour clock, in which 5:35
P.M
. would be transformed to 17:35h—but in the weeks to come it would lead to something much grander indeed. An idea for time zones and their relationship to longitude started forming. Four months later, back in Toronto, at a meeting of the now well-established Canadian Institute, he presented his first time paper on the reckoning of “terrestrial, non-local” time.

Heat still rises from the pages of that first paper as he remembered the night in Bandoran. “This was the first few days’ experience of a visitor from a distant country to the United Kingdom,” he wrote, “where untold wealth and talent have, during many years, been expended in establishing, developing, and perfecting the railway system!” His initial proposal was far too complicated, combining standard time zones with a single, universal time for the world, tying longitude to time and, of course, imposing the twenty-four-hour clock.

Its central difficulty, however, was its failure to endorse a prime meridian, a place where the time zones for the world were to begin. There is something almost perverse in his refusal to accept the obvious appeal of Greenwich, which he avoided on the grounds of arousing “national susceptibilities,” a euphemism for French resistance. That resistance created obvious complications,
which he addressed rather ingeniously. Instead of a prime meridian, he proposed an imaginary “chronometer” in the middle of the earth, a clock face like a giant gauge that would convert time to longitude and vice versa.

Fleming’s chronometer resembles nothing so much as one of the earliest mathematical problems he had faced while studying for his surveyor’s commission in 1848, a version of that insoluble puzzler, squaring the circle. The problem as stated:
Even the four sides of a quadrilateral figure inscribed in a circle
. In other words, can the area of a four-sided figure inscribed within a circle ever equal that of the circle? (Charles Piazzi Smyth, the astronomer-royal of Scotland, and one of the true characters in the history of the profession—“keeping as ever to his own orbit,” a visitor to his observatory in Edinburgh once declared—devoted years to trying to prove the pi-qualities of the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The motive behind his mission was to disprove the utility of the godless French meter and to uphold the honor of the Imperial inch, which he contended had been invented and used by the Greeks. Needless to say, the effort nearly ruined his reputation as a serious scientist.) In devising the buried chronometer, Fleming was addressing a purely temporal version of the same puzzle—how to divide the universal day into local parts, without imposing an arbitrary prime meridian.

This is Fleming’s intellectual habit: deductive,
a priori
reasoning, from general principle or universal theory, back to the particular, or individual, application. From soaring premise to the rubble of mere detail. In the nineteenth century both forms of reasoning, deductive and inductive,
a priori
and
a posteriori
, were considered legitimate and productive. Today we’re more suspicious of the anticipatory leaps that deductive logic can sometimes make.

The paper on “Terrestrial Time” was far too difficult for commercial adoption in its day. For starters, it would require new dials to be glued over every watch- or clock face in existence (for
which he made five U.S. patent applications, failing the test of uniqueness on four of the five insofar as innovative watch faces had been proposed, though never built, a generation earlier). There would be an outer wheel of twenty-four Roman numerals representing the time zones, and an inner wheel of twenty-four letters (omitting J and Z) representing the hours (plus a numerical innermost ring representing the minutes). It would be possible to read the time as M.22, for example, a mind-numbing exercise even today, but it confronts a problem we (or our children) might find intriguing. Why Greenwich, or any other meridian, we might ask? A land surveyor, or a ship’s captain, might be wedded to exact geographic meridians, but what of virtual meridians in space? There’s something inconsistent between our cesium-ion clock’s ability to divide each second into billions of parts, and our toeing a line, a starting gate, drawn a hundred and fifty years ago.

Nature is uncharacteristically accommodating in matching a twenty-four-thousand-mile circumference of the earth to a ready-made twenty-four-hour day. Each of twenty-four time zones, therefore, occupies fifteen degrees, or approximately a thousand miles of latitude. It’s obvious—but should rational people necessarily be expected to follow? In some ways, perhaps, we were taken in by a vast coincidence. We already know that Fleming saw time as a flowing continuity, and it is only natural that his instinct would be to honor the flow and not to dam it with an arbitrary, stop-and-go prime meridian. Is there a way of separating time from the constraints of a politicized, commercialized prime? Can time be freed from geography, history, and nationality all together? From that moment on, and especially after his second (simplified) paper in 1878, in which the buried clock was abandoned and a surprising new prime meridian was proposed, Fleming became the focus of time reform for the world.

The multiplicity of local times (“What times is it?”) and their reconciliation to the single “cosmic” moment, was the motivation
behind Fleming’s first reforms. Ideally, he felt, everyone in the world should be on the same temporal page, we should know instantaneously, by a single mode of time-reckoning (like soldiers in the field or pilots in the sky), what time it is, everywhere. Time zones were appropriate for local considerations, he felt, but travel schedules and communications should be rendered in universal time.

Fleming’s first proposal had a futuristic ring to it, rather like the “stardate” at the beginning of every
Star Trek
episode. It showed him to be rooted in practicality, and in his training as a surveyor
(“Point out how the longitude is formed”
), but open to abstraction. In an opening burst of enthusiasm, he even translated a railroad schedule into his new temporal language, not that he ever submitted it to the Time Convention of the Railroad Association. The North American railroad passenger would have to keep consulting, for another seven years, the temporal correspondences and competing schedules in Mr. William F. Allen’s
The Railroad Traveler’s Official Guide
, the American version of the Irish guide that had misled Mr. Fleming, and just hope that he had read it correctly and that no demons had crept into the text.

Telling time or keeping track of time outside of one’s own township was an ongoing irritation in the 1870s, the degree of confusion directly proportional to the number of long-distance travelers using the system. The majority of people in the 1870s were still able to arrange time to suit their convenience, even arranging a noontime stroll to watch the dropping of the local time-ball and to take out their watches and make a precise adjustment. How better to maintain communal integrity? Every self-respecting town on the continent had a right to its own newspaper, its own baseball or cricket team, and its own individual time.

IN
1881 the venerable
Atlantic Monthly
, Boston’s literary and intellectual voice, proposed a minor heresy: New England
should adopt New York City time. Boston local time (or, to be more precise, that part of universal time that passed over the Boston meridian) was twelve minutes ahead of New York City’s, enough to engender chaos in towns like Hartford, Connecticut, or in western Massachusetts, where the two standards clashed. The
Atlantic
was giving public voice, perhaps for the first time (and perhaps courtesy of a “leak” at the Railroad Time Convention) to the secret debates that had been animating the professional societies: