Time Lord (7 page)

Reading the American transcendentalists, in fact, might lead
one to think that British Romanticism, chased out of its homeland by the Industrial Revolution, had found a refuge in New England. Britain had embraced technological change so avidly and successfully that nearly every miraculous invention of the first half of the nineteenth century—chemical dyes, the railway, the telegraph, the open-hearth oven—has a British provenance. The decade of the 1850s in England commenced with the opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the leadership provided by that most progressive, most scientifically educated of all royal patrons, Prince Albert. Profits from the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace were plowed back into the building and maintenance of technical colleges. This was Britain’s answer to the universal call to revolution: more industry, more science, more research, broader technical education for the middle classes, science lectures to workingmen’s clubs. The decade ended on the publication of the most influential book of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
, which became an instant best-seller. But, should I not have made my point, Britain began that decade not just with the Great Exhibition, but with the uniting and vitalizing introduction of standard time.

ANYONE LOOKING
to the future of the two great English-speaking cultures at that moment in history would have predicted for England scientific, material, and economic dominance, under a tone of unwavering rationality. For America, the same futurist might have sketched a path of dreamy agrarianism and genial mysticism with solipsistic tendencies. Given the apparent bent of their national genius, it is striking that pragmatism, that most American of philosophies, the test of validity through life experience, should have arisen in New England a mere forty years later. Something revolutionary must have intervened to turn America away from the New England model and in the direction of heavy industry and technology, and the creation of new models of leadership, ambition and success.

One such “revolution” was the Gold Rush (1848–49), which focused attention on California and the fastest way to get there before the wealth ran out. Clearly, this left New Englanders at a disadvantage. One can hardly imagine a stronger contrast to the communal democratic traditions of New England than the golem that emerged from those raw, instant settlements in the Sierra foothills, or in the ports of San Francisco and Oakland. From them arose all the antisocial, anti-intellectual, vulgar, violent, and materialist impulses that America’s founding elites and Tocqueville in his darkest moments had had good reason to fear.

During the next decade, New England took the moral lead in the antislavery debates, but the Civil War (1861–65) cut across the subculture of New England like an ax blade, severing the region, almost uniquely, from direct contact with the war or territorial participation in it. The war brought suffering and death to America on a scale never before or later seen, and along with it came authentic, one might even say existential, issues of sin and redemption in the real world, not in the gothic shadows. The war opened up the Midwest, unleashed industry, and elevated to leadership a new breed of impatient, self-educated, practical materialists, many of them the mechanical men of Thoreau’s nightmare. The railroad men not only wore the railroad on their backs, they seemed to have ingested it as well. The generation of Harvard Unitarians was finished.

During those twenty years (1850–70) of the testing of the American identity, England was enjoying unchallenged hegemony over the world. “Sleeping giants” were everywhere in the 1860s—Russia, Germany, and the Japanese Empire notably, and there was always the uncertain fate of the chronic “sick man,” the Ottoman Empire, which still controlled the restive Balkans, the Middle East, and much of North Africa—but the true sleeping giant was America, and it was only beginning to stir.

After 1869 in the United States, with the linking of the continent by rail and with the rapid populating of the formerly inaccessible
West, the inner rhythm, that inherited sense of ordered time and space whose defining engines had been the horse and the sail metered by the sun, was ripped apart, never to return. Three thousand miles—a six months’ journey around Cape Horn to the goldfields of California in 1848—could be covered in five days inside a single comfortable car. Settlements on the rail line, like Omaha or Denver, became major cities virtually overnight. Chicago quadrupled its population, all because of the rails. The integration of various networks, particularly the railway and telegraph grid (they were inseparable; railroads could not function without telegraphic signaling), demanded coherence and convertibility, and a simplification of the various time standards. Not incidentally, the first proposal for standard time, a way of simplifying the hundreds of bewildering railway schedules, came from a professor in Saratoga Springs, New York, Charles Dowd, and it is dated 1869.

Since North America extends five solar hours from Newfoundland to the Pacific, and four more to the tip of the Aleutian chain, it offers the possibility of hundreds of viable time standards. Time had been complicated enough when the majority of Americans were clustered along the eastern seaboard and had to negotiate time standards that were rarely greater than half an hour apart. Projecting the same complications across the entire continent was enough to induce temporal nausea. The territory was too vast, and the population growing too numerous—time had lost its meaning. Coordination of command is the reason armies run on military time, or, in our day, that airlines communicate in a single world standard called “Zulu.” Out on the frontier in the nineteenth century it didn’t matter to cowboys what time it was on the cattle drive, or when they hit Dodge City for a drink; but if desperadoes planned to rob a mail train, or knock over a bank when the payrolls arrived a few towns away, a crude temporal calculation was necessary.

———

F
LEMING’S ARRIVAL
as an eighteen-year-old in the unpromising village of Peterborough, Ontario, where tree stumps still cluttered the main street, echoes the arrival of his hero, Ben Franklin, in Philadelphia a century earlier. No position, no parents, just a strong back, a keen mind, and a willingness to work, ready to do anything honorable that returned a decent wage.

As a result of Franklin’s example, Fleming had probably not wasted a minute without profound self-recrimination. From his earliest diaries, even as a teenager, there emerges a self-portrait of overall gravity, and an expectation of return on invested time. Idle moments in his childhood and adolescence had been spent in chess, sketching and hiking, and dreaming up inventions. On a typical day in April 1843, at the age of sixteen, he sketched a planned monument to Adam Smith. Then, in a scheme worthy of Sir Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson, he devised a “fine exercise to make a plan of some old castle then fill up the building and make it like the supposed original, such as Sea-field, Peathead, Macduff’s (with caves). One of the caves at the Wemyss would make a fine place for drawing a band of robbers.” The afternoon was taken up learning Odell’s Shorthand Alphabet, then studying the recipe for oil paper and another for case-hardening. He sketched a church, designed a roller skate, then copied an extract from
Poor Richard’s Almanac:
“But thou dost love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of. How much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep, forgetting that the sleeping fox catches no poultry, and that there will be sleeping enough in the grave. Sloth maketh all things difficult, but industry all easy; and he that riseth late must trot all day and shall scarcely overtake his business at night; while laziness travels so slow that poverty soon overtakes him.” Before closing for the night, he described a machine for taking portraits by the silhouette method, then designed a system of pumps for
propelling vessels at sea on the principle of Barker’s Mill. (The “Barkers” were charged with removing bark from logs by directing high-powered jets of water.)

Physically robust, he led a full partying life; hangovers and morning-after flagellations are part of the youthful record, and were never really abandoned. In later years, he was forever retiring to the decks for a smoke, to his study for brandy and correspondence. His grandchildren remembered even in his old age the smell of cigars and brandy on his breath. Back in Kirkcaldy there was a lass, Maggie Barclay by name, with whom he might have settled, had he stayed. At least John Sang thought so. His letters rarely failed to mention her unchanged beauty and availability.

In 1843, at age sixteen, he sketched plans for an electrical-storage and light-distribution system. Two years later he wrote in his diary:

Venture capital was an undeveloped resource in Canada and Scotland, and the prototype was never built.

And what about Sandford Fleming’s Canada in 1848? It was a rough-hewn place. Montreal was the center of power, culture, and commerce, Quebec City the effective capital. Both conducted
themselves as “English” cities. Toronto chafed under its comparative status with Montreal for the better part of a century. (“Hog Town” was Toronto’s dismissive designation, uptight, moralistic, grim, and prissy, until the tide, a virtual tsunami, started turning in Toronto’s favor in the 1960s and onward.) Fleming was then a young man of twenty-one, busily constructing a life, taking his town and harbor surveys, selling his maps, bringing his parents over and settling them on a farm near Lakeview. The outer world barely left an impression. On March 20, 1848, he noted in his diary: “News of the Revolution in France comes to Peterboro this morning.” End of story.

It was not revolution—more, in fact, something closer to the temper of that time and place, a conservative counterrevolutionary riot—that greeted Fleming in Montreal in April 1849. He’d gone to the metropolis three months after his twenty-second birthday to sit for his surveyor’s commission exam, but arrived on a night in which the Houses of Parliament were being torched. He and three young passersby rushed inside the lobby to save the portrait of Queen Victoria. (“Tonight,” he reported, “I slept with the crown.”) In 1850, at twenty-three, building upon two stimulating years as a member of a Toronto debating society (“Whether India or Africa Suffered Most from Europe”), he and a friend started the Canadian Institute. At the first meeting, they were the only attendees. Rather than abandon the dream, they elected officers: Frederick F. Passmore the president, Fleming the secretary-treasurer. A week later, he read a speech to scant attendance; a week after that, a paper on “The Formation and Preservation of Toronto Harbour”; and soon attendance started growing.

As a good Scots Presbyterian, Fleming was usually full of high-minded New Year’s resolutions, transcribed in perhaps a shaky hand after a day of heavy “first footing” excess. In 1853, the twenty-five-year-old striver offered a glimpse of his busy life, and a view of the future:

The problem facing Fleming—and other Canadian visionaries wishing to import the technologies of Europe and the United States, as well as parliamentary-style, confederated government—was the lack of a forum. (It brings to mind a joke that Canadians hear all of their lives: Ah, blessed Canada! She could have had the technology of America, the government of Britain and the culture of France. What she got was American culture, French government, and British know-how.) Creating a forum for social and scientific ideas lay behind his establishment of the Canadian Institute. Elevating the political discourse, spreading scientific discovery, and making the scattered British colonies more representative and less dependent on Britain was a continual challenge. Too few people were spread over too great an area, segregated into too many competing jurisdictions, and further alienated by religion, language, and cultural tradition, for effective joint action to be anything other than fitful and self-defeating. Fleming was by no means alone as a progressive, but his efforts were often thwarted by the barriers of scale.

Nevertheless, he persevered. More than nearly anyone in the 1860s, he built the political support for the confederation of the separate British colonies, and succeeded. In the 1870s and early 1880s he orchestrated world support for standard time, and in 1884 he succeeded. Still later, and at great personal cost, he bravely rallied the informal commonwealth of overseas dominions against British communications monopolies, and succeeded in laying the worldwide, undersea cable.

A thousand miles east of Toronto, in 1851, the Railway Minister of the Nova Scotia colony, Joseph Howe, ventured a prophecy that is almost eerie in its accuracy. Fleming heard it as well, and filed it for later use. Fleming and Howe would not meet for another thirteen years, by which time Howe’s obvious capacity for leadership would carry him to the top of Nova Scotia’s parliamentary ranks.