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

Blaise, Clark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375727523 ISBN 13: 9780375727528

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2002

Synopsis

It is difficult today to imagine life before standard time was established in 1884. In the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, there were 144 official time zones in North America alone. The confusion that ensued, especially among the burgeoning railroad companies, was an hourly comedy of errors that ultimately threatened to impede progress. The creation of standard time, with its two dozen global time zones, is one of the great inventions of the Victorian Era, yet it has been largely taken for granted.

In Time Lord, Clark Blaise re-creates the life of Sanford Fleming, who struggled to convince the world to accept standard time. It's a fascinating story of science, politics, nationalism, and the determined vision of one man who changed the world. Set in a time marked by substantial technological and cultural transformation, Time Lord is also an erudite exploration of art, literature, consciousness, and our changing relationship to time

About this title

Review:

"I didn't go to the moon, I went much further--for time is the longest distance between two places".

These lines, from Tennessee Williams' play The Glass Menagerie, aptly describe the correlative at the heart of Clark Blaise's brilliantly quirky exploration of the universal acceptance of time zones, and their advocate, Sir Sandford Fleming. At first glance, it appears as though yet another frock-coated Victorian is being dragged by his whiskers to the biographical fore, but Blaise's is more than a mere salvage operation. Fleming, a Scot-Canadian surveyor and visionary, was to produce the first street maps of Toronto, engineer the trans-Canadian railway, and pioneer the trans-Pacific telegraph from London to Australia. A timetable misprint in Ireland, and subsequent missed connection, also provided the stimulus for the notion of a 24-hour clock. His claim to the creation of a single standard time (precipitated by the railroads, which made a currency of time) was endorsed in 1884 at a conference that also set Greenwich as the prime meridian, to France's dismay. Fleming favoured an anti-prime, but there were last laughs for both Fleming and the French: Fleming's anti-prime became the International Date Line, while today France controls UTC (Universal Co-ordinated Time).

The subject may be the ordering of Time, but Blaise's course is feistily non-linear. Adopting a gently ironical tone, he rejoices in the sidings as much as the mainlines, where he digresses into literary, philosophical or personal musings rather than follow Victorian didacticism. The central axis of "Time Lord", which could pass for the frisky cousin of Dava Sobel's Longitude, is a study of modernism, with its notion of fractured, recycled time. There is an amazing section of nearly 40 pages without mention of Fleming, analysing writers such as Hemingway and Faulkner, and the penultimate chapter is an outrageously enjoyable tract on the representative character of Sherlock Holmes. Blaise, himself a Canadian, somehow pulls the threads together, and vibrantly captures the times of a Victorian who touched his life, and whose achievement still regulates our contemporary identity as "temporal millionaires", infatuated with e-mails and mobile phones. --David Vincent

Review:

"[A] complex examination where the yarn is put in richly detailed context and in clever, careful prose. . . . Blaise's gifts for dry humor and well-chosen description are apparent." --San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"[A] powerful example of what it takes to get countries and their ethnocentric leaders to agree on one idea, one standard, and a unified mission that places the stakes on the future.." --Amy Tan.

"Blaise, a graceful and engaging writer, leaves his narrative and wanders through thickets of art and culture." --The New York Times Book Review

"A fascinating story... and the wonder is that it's not better known." --Adam Hochschild

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0375727523
• ISBN 13: 9780375727528
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272