Clark Blaise: Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming And The Creation Of Standard Time

Filed under: Book Reviews, Clark Blaise, Science   

Jonathan Kiefer

Time Lord - Clark Blaise

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For the chief engineer of a national railroad company, especially one so industrious as Sandford Fleming in 1876, misreading a timetable - and thereby missing a train - was especially irksome. Fleming redressed this embarrassment with the most enduring achievement of the Victorian era. He invented Standard Time. We of the Information Age owe him a debt of gratitude, and so, more than a century later, Clark Blaise has honored Fleming’s feat with a book, Time Lord.

Folding Fleming’s story into a survey of the Steam Age, and distilling the historic, philosophical and aesthetic repercussions of 19th-century progress, Time Lord reaches higher than its stock science-fictiony title might suggest (with all due respect to Dr. Who). It isn’t Blaise’s scholarship, however, that allows him inside Fleming’s mind, but rather his empathy and poetic sensibility. The book charms and fascinates precisely because it embraces the romance of a new frontier - as first surveyed by a quiet revolutionary.

"We are back again in that moment, identified by Henry Adams in 1844, when the world changed perceptibly, due to railroads, ships, and the telegraph; or perhaps it is the moment of Britain’s standardization, noted by Dickens; or of Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond. We are back to the generation of Melville’s Bartleby, and the struggle to mold time, language, and character into a single coherent story."

Inspired by affinity and curiosity, Blaise delivers that dizzying, inventive epoch, the velocity-spawned birth of modernism, the shock of a shrinking world, the motion sickness of sea change, and the necessary "sophisticated abstraction" of standardized time.

To accuse him of overstating the confusion and anxiety born from a multiplicity of pre-standardized "local" times is to forget what life in 19th-century North America’s 144 "official" times was like. Back then, even the best and brightest wrestled unsuccessfully with very real world problems about trains leaving stations at different times. Railroad accidents, as Blaise explains, "were daily events." The oceans, full of competing "prime" meridians and ships of varied national loyalties, were no safer. It took the Prime Meridian Conference, a diplomatic and political juggernaut tirelessly organized by Sandford Fleming, to sort everything out.

"The nineteenth century struck down God but didn’t bury him," Blaise suggests, "it erected standard time in his place." Time Lord reads like a labour of love, formally imperfect, perhaps, not precisely balanced, but hand-crafted and singular. It’s a book for the bookish, written not for the student of engineering, but for the student of literature. Blaise offers a hunk of Dickens here and there, for support to be sure, but also to share the pleasure of reading those sentences. He attributes Hemingway’s low comma-count to a new kind of "temporal anxiety." He finds irresistible fodder in Faulkner: "… Only when the clock stops does time come to life."

The truly impatient might charge Blaise with digressing too much, descending into name-dropping or mere literary criticism. But the author’s most revealing and engaging moments depend on such deep reading. What’s more, Blaise has learned, through 15 other books of various forms, restraint, good humor, and humility. He has learned the right way to include himself. Remembering the wild success of Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman (about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary), or, a closer relative, Dava Sobel’s Longitude (about the creation of longitude) offers reassurance that Time Lord will find its deserved niche. Such books do important work, and attest to our gratitude and ongoing collective affection for the real, often unsung idea-people, whose single-minded-if mind-numbing-pursuits have literally changed the world.

Posted on June 1st, 2001.

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