Time Lord (18 page)
Authors: Clark Blaise
The railroad was reconfigured as a private corporation under the direction of the Chicago-born William Cornelius Van Horne. Thus it was an American who saved Canada from American designs. (And the most designing “American” of all was the Canadian-born James J. Hill, head of the Minnesota-based Great Northern, who recommended Van Horne in the first place.) Under Van Horne, the intractable choices between northern and southern routes through the Rocky Mountains were resolved. Van Horne was efficient, which is to say in that era, sufficiently ruthless and brilliant to proceed rapidly. He also benefited from the principal lesson Parliament had learned from Fleming: that an undertaking the size of the CPR had to be privatized and insulated from political oversight. Thus even Fleming’s greatest failure provided useful instruction. Note, incidentally, that when a second cross-country route, that of the Canadian National Railway,
was extended to the Pacific, it followed Fleming’s survey-route through Yellowhead Pass.
It was at the beginning of this dismal period that his time paper was rejected in Dublin. And then, his good fortune returned. George Grant wrangled a largely honorary appointment for him as chancellor of a Scottish-Presbyterian institution, Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario. The job required his appearance on campus for no more than five days a year. He proved himself an exceptional fund-raiser, especially through his friend and fellow Fifer, Andrew Carnegie. He accepted directorships from the CPR and the Hudson’s Bay Company. The rest of his life, for the next thirty-five years, was devoted to travel, writing, and lectures.
Fleming’s harshest critic is Canada’s popular historian Pierre Berton, whose
National Dream: The Great Railway 1871–1881
, is the most readable account of the political and financial intrigue that swirled around the building of the railway. Of Fleming’s failure he wrote:
When the Royal Commission finally made its report it came down very hard on the former engineer-in-chief but by then the construction of the railway was proceeding apace. Fleming went off to the International Geographical Congress in Venice to ride in gondolas and deliver a paper entitled “The Adoption of a Prime Meridian.” Greater glories followed. His biography, when it was published, did not mention the petty jealousies, the bursts of temperament, the political jockeying, the caution, the waste and the near anarchy that were commonplace in the engineering offices of the public works department under his rule. He survived it all and strode into the history books without a scar. The story of his term as Engineer-in-Chief is tangled and confused, neither black nor white, since it involved neither villains nor saints but a hastily recruited group of very human and often brilliant men faced with superhuman problems, not the least of which was the
spectre of the Unknown, and subjected to more than ordinary tensions including the insistent tug of their own ambitions.
I will return to Berton’s charges a little later, but observe here only that Berton, at his narrowest, is correct in his charges. Fleming’s term of office on the CPR was a failure, and part of the responsibility for failure surely rests with him.
Berton’s evocation of the mysterious “Unknown” lends itself to many interpretations; certainly he is referring to a host of problems, some of which were technical in nature, others political, and still others international. In general, anything undertaken by Canada is in some way informed by, accelerated by, or deformed by the the gravitational force of the United States. Like most anxieties, it can fuel ambition, or an extraordinary effort to transcend it.
Fleming’s response to the aggressive presence of the United States was to resist it through a vigilant eclecticism, and to take from America, when possible, its energy and self-confidence. A sympathetic but fearful outsider like Fleming, looking southward in the early 1870s from his surveying encampment on the prairies, wondered to his friend George Grant if a more humane way of development than the American model of wholesale slaughter of all inconvenient human and animal life could not be found (though he was not overly optimistic). He marveled as well at America’s energy unfolding across the continent, and at Canada’s apparent inability to harness the same enthusiasm.
IN
1876 Fleming began to interpose himself into the standardtime debate through papers delivered at the Canadian Institute and his membership in a number of American engineering societies. He was no out-of-touch professor from a women’s seminary in upstate New York; he was the friend of the rich and powerful in Montreal, London, New York, and Toronto, yet he still needed instructions on how to behave with the American power structure.
Accustomed as he was to “memorializing” the governor-general and gaining royal assent for nearly any enterprise, and coming from a hierarchical society where he enjoyed instant access and prestige, he had to be advised not to depend on official channels. Abbe was his American mentor, and he knew whereof he spoke:
It is not easy for those high in scientific or official Government positions to impose upon the business world any radical reform; the practical man rejects it as theoretical and the private citizen rejects it as an official impertinence by Government with his personal rights. Any law passed by our Congress would be apt to fall to the ground unless it has the hearty support of the people, the lawyers, and the judges. I doubt whether it is best to spend much time trying to force the American nautical Almanac to adopt the time reform. Better to move through commercial, not political channels.
In the comparative anarchy that was the United States, the appearance of a government endorsement could have negative effects on popular support. It is a practical lesson that Fleming immediately applied. He became something of a demon spokesman at chambers of commerce, cultivating dozens of such organizations in Canada, the United States, and, eventually, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia.
Let me return, in some detail, to his first paper, “Uniform Non-Local Time (Terrestrial Time),” which was delivered before the Canadian Institute in November 1876, just three months after his return from Ireland. Like a first novel, it is rife with autobiographical elements. There’s the recent Bandoran experience, the autodidact’s historical research, and the idealist’s impossible schemes. It is the
ur
-manuscript from which he drew all subsequent (and far simpler) refinements, but it shows that the idea for world time, which he later called “cosmic time,” was with him
full-blown from the beginning. It shows that Fleming’s proposals owe nothing to Dowd, Abbe, or Allen. Truly, “time was in the air,” and in ways that neither Mr. Myers nor Mr. Allen, nor even Professor Dowd, suspected.
The paper was divided into five parts. First came “the difficulties arising from the present mode of reckoning time,” in other words, a world with too many times is a world without time at all; the familiar descriptions of “natural” and “conventional” divisions of time came second; third, a history of systems of time-reckoning, ancient and modern. It is the fourth and fifth sections, called “The importance of having ‘Uniform time’ all over the world” and “The practicability of securing all the advantages of uniformity, while preserving existing local customs,” that concern us here and open directly into a universe both familiar and alien. Call it Victorian modernism.
Time and space were the true identities: twenty-four hours for the clock, twenty-four meridians dividing the earth. Why the hypothetical chronometer? It functioned as an impersonal time god, a kind of hyper-time. Fleming described the new hours:
They ought not to be considered hours in the ordinary sense, but simply twenty-fourth parts of the mean time occupied in the diurnal revolution of the earth. Hours, as we usually refer to them, have a distinct relation to noon or to midnight at some particular place on the earth’s surface; while the time indicated by the Standard Chronometer would have no special relation to any particular locality or longitude: it would be common and equally related to all places; and the twenty-four sub-divisions of the day would be simply portions of abstract time.
From his first paper on time-reckoning, Fleming was trying to separate the physical reality of time from the socially and psychologically constructed reality of hours. The numbered hours
(“Six
P.M.
, is dinner ready?” “Six
A.M.
, have you done your chores?”) are difficult to separate from local considerations—that is, from local or natural time—unless we change their names and our habits of association. Calling five
P.M
. by its new name of seventeen hours would help, but it was not enough. By proposing the concept of “abstract time,” the hypothetical regulator set in the middle of the earth (or in the clouds), he was attempting to liberate time from specific locations:
The standard time-keeper is referred to the centre of the earth in order clearly to bring out the idea, that it is equally related to every point on the surface of the globe. The standard might be stationed anywhere, at Yokohama, at Cairo, at St Petersburg, at Greenwich or at Washington. Indeed, the proposed system if carried into force, would result in establishing many keepers of standard time, perhaps in every country, the electric telegraph affording the means of securing perfect synchronism all over the earth.
The evocation of the telegraph—exact, instantaneous, and man-made—rather than the sun as a regulator of time marks Fleming as the protomodernist he was. It also alerted the French, who were more advanced in the applications of telegraphy to time than anyone else, to the presence of a man they felt they could work with.
The invisible, imagined, omnipresent “time-keeper” bears a strong resemblance to other Victorian deistic constructions. It, or He, is the invisible regulator of human affairs, otherwise tucked away and invisible. In short, Fleming was proposing a single time for the entire world, to be called “terrestrial” time or “universal time,” so that when one’s timepiece read “G.05,” all timepieces in the world would register the same G hour. (It would not be G everywhere, of course; but every location on earth would know, as we know today by consulting the front
pages of our telephone books, what time it is, relative to ourselves, anywhere else in the world.) If a train were departing at L.15, it would signify that it was leaving, relative to G.05, in four hours and ten minutes (no J, remember), and it would not matter if G were a morning hour and L an afternoon, since
A.M
. and
P.M
. were notations of the past. You were located both where, and when. Time and place were identities.
(In the theory’s next incarnation, in 1878, Fleming proposed a modification of his twenty-four-hour clock. The hours from midnight to noon would read one through twelve, as they do now, but the
P.M
. hours would be marked by letters, starting with the same time-zone letter where one happened to be residing. Greenwich was Z, so that much of eastern North America, five zones earlier than Greenwich, was designated as U. Again, Fleming’s pedagogical purpose was to fuse time and longitude, eliminating the social aspect of time. By 1880 his next revision had abandoned an East Coast landfall, and the Greenwich meridian as well.)
“Every traveller having a good watch,” he wrote, “would carry with him the precise time that he would find employed everywhere. Post meridiem could never be mistaken for ante meridiem. Railway and steamboat time-tables would be simplified, and rendered more intelligible, to the generality of mankind than many of them are now.” M.05 means merely that it is five minutes past the M hour, which follows L and leads to N. It is not important to know what the letters correspond to in old-style numbered hours, since communications and schedules would only appear in the new style. One schedule would fit all listings, in all localities. There would be a separate reckoning for local time, which he did not propose eliminating—he just wanted to eliminate local time for any calculation beyond a strictly local application.
How would it work, practically? Or, more precisely, how would it
look
?
If a gentleman living in Philadelphia were to send a telegram to a relative in London announcing the very moment of his child’s birth, in ways that would be mutually comprehensible, it might read as follows:
My dear brother Basil: At U:22 today 17 January 1881 our son Algernon Augustus III was born. (signed) A. A. Smith, Jr
.
By such means, Uncle Basil in London, receiving the cable at Z:50, turns his watch face and learns that his bonny nephew was born a mere twenty-eight minutes earlier (in “real” or “universal” time). But without the meridional calculation, the time of transmission from Philadelphia, 3:22
P.M.
, would have no readily translatable equivalent to London’s 8:50
P.M
. By 9:00
P.M.
, Uncle Basil might cable his congratulations back to Philadelphia, where it arrives at, say, 4:00
P.M.
, local time. But the familial dignity of the occasion, and the technological achievement, would be obscured—literally—by the mutually unintelligible numbers.
Wouldn’t it be more reassuring, more conducive to human understanding, for Algernon to receive Basil’s wire at U:00 and know that his loving brother had responded to the news at Z:00, only minutes after having received it? As Frederick Barnard, the President of Columbia University, had noted at the 1882 meeting of the Metrological Society:
Mr. Fleming had caused to be constructed a watch to illustrate the proposed system. On the dial the hours ran from one to twenty-four, and surrounding the dial was a movable ring bearing the letters representative of cosmic time. By bringing the letters corresponding to any of the twenty-four standard meridians to the hour
twenty-four
, the watch will show instantly both the local time of that meridian and also the cosmic time.
(It may seem a simple-enough technology, another Victorian gauge, but it would disclose at a glance—and a twist of the
wrist—one’s local time relative to the time at any place in the world. The results would replace the bulky maps and notations, but the impulse anticipates today’s cell-phone technology, which seeks a wireless connectedness at the flick of a button, for many of the same human and commercial reasons.)
