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

Blaise, Clark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375727523 ISBN 13: 9780375727528

Publisher: Vintage, 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:

In the 1880s, a businessman traveling by train from New York to Boston needed, on arrival, to adjust his clock, moving it ahead by 12 minutes. The strange increment, writes Clark Blaise, was a matter of local interpretation, some enterprising Bostonian having determined that the rising sun touched the shore of Massachusetts a dozen minutes before warming Manhattan.

Such local interpretations of time made the job of establishing railroad schedules a matter of guesswork and hope, as the Canadian entrepreneur Sandford Fleming discovered when he missed a train in the west of Ireland in 1876. Frustrated, Fleming realized that a new system of universal time would need to be created if railroad travel were ever to realize its full potential. As Blaise writes, "the adoption of standard time for the world was as necessary for commercial advancement as the invention of the elevator was for modern urban development," and nations such as England that had a system of standard time in place owed much of their economic superiority to the predictability and reliability such a system put in place.

Fleming discovered that getting the world onto the same schedule required years of negotiating and browbeating, a nightmare that Blaise ably recounts. Fleming's efforts eventually paid off, and as Blaise writes, "Of all the inventions of the Industrial Age, standard time has endured, virtually unchanged, the longest." His entertaining account of how that came to be will be of appeal to readers who enjoyed Dava Sobel's Longitude, Henry Petroski's The Pencil, and other popular works in the history of technology. --Gregory McNamee

From the Back Cover:

“[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: Vintage
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0375727523
• ISBN 13: 9780375727528
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272