Episode 101. 18:53 Working Tools Series: Time

What time is it? 

When you check your phone to see what time it is in another country, when airlines synchronize international flight schedules, when financial markets trade across continents—all of this traces back to a long night spent in a rural railway station by a Brother Mason, who refused to accept that the world's approach to timekeeping was good enough.

“Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time.” Did Roger Waters know who Sandford Fleming was? It’s Minnesota Masonic Histories & Mysteries. 

Transcript

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in the summer of 1876, Sanford Fleming found himself stranded in a small railway station in Ireland, staring at a schedule that had just costume his connection The timetable clearly stated The train to London Dairy departed at 5 35, but what it failed to clarify was whether that meant morning or evening. the printer had listed PM when they meant am. And by the time Fleming arrived at the station expecting an afternoon departure. The morning train had long since gone. Most travelers would've cursed their luck, perhaps written an angry letter to the railway company and moved on with their lives. Fleming, however, was not most travelers as he settled into the uncomfortable waiting room for what would become a very long night. An idea began forming in his mind, one that would eventually transform how the entire world measured time, Fleming was already a man of considerable accomplishment. Born in Scotland in 1827, He had immigrated to Canada at age 18 with little more than ambition and a surveyor's training. By the 1870s, he had become one of Canada's foremost railway engineers, serving as chief engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railway. The massive project that would eventually link Canada's Atlantic and Pacific coasts. He had designed Canada's first postage stamp. Even created an early prototype of inline skates, but his experience in that railway station would lead to his most enduring legacy. The problem Fleming recognized that night went far beyond a simple printing error. The entire world's approach to timekeeping had become hopelessly inadequate for the modern age. For millennia, communities had set their clocks based on local solar time. When the sun reached its highest point in the sky, that was noon. This system worked perfectly well when most people never traveled more than a few miles from home. But the 19th century had unleashed two revolutionary technologies that made local time catastrophically impractical. The railroad and the telegraph. Trains could now carry passengers hundreds of miles in a single day passing through dozens of towns that each kept their own local time In North America alone, there were over 100 different local times in use. A traveler going from Boston to San Francisco would need to reset their watch. It nearly every stop. Railway companies attempted to solve this by setting their own railroad time, but with multiple competing railways. This only added to the confusion. some major stations displayed multiple clocks showing different times simultaneously, one for local time, others for various railway companies. The chaos wasn't merely inconvenient. It was dangerous. Trains occasionally collided because engineers were operating on different time standards. Telegraphs transmitted messages instantly across continents, but the timestamps were meaningless when every city used a different clock. scientific observations of astronomical events like the Northern Lights couldn't be properly coordinated when observers couldn't agree on what time something had occurred. after his uncomfortable night in that train station, Fleming became obsessed with solving this problem. In 1876, he presented a paper titled Terrestrial Time to the Canadian Institute, proposing something Radical, abandoned Local Times entirely in favor of a single universal time for the entire planet. Fleming's initial concept, which he called cosmic time, and later cosmopolitan time was breathtakingly ambitious. He proposed a single 24 hour clock that would be the same everywhere on earth, Conceptually located at the center of the planet rather than tied to any surface location. Under this system, when it was 1500 cosmic time, it would be 1500 everywhere in London, in Tokyo, in San Francisco. Local communities could still use their traditional times for daily life, but for railways, telegraphs, and international coordination. Everyone would reference this single global clock. his proposal included an ingenious compliment to this universal time. Dividing the world into 24 time zones, each spanning 15 degrees of longitude. One 24th of Earth's 360 degrees circumference. Each time zone would differ from its neighbor by exactly one hour. Fleming labeled these time zones with letters, A through Y, excluding J to avoid confusion with I, with G designated the zone aligned with Greenwich England To demonstrate his concept, Fleming commissioned a custom pocket watch around 1880, now held in the collections of the Smithsonian's American History Museum. One side displayed conventional 12 hour time. The other showed his 24 hour cosmic time system with alphabetical zone markers. It was a tangible representation of his vision for synchronized global timekeeping. Fleming spent the next several years as an evangelist for his system presenting papers at conferences, lobbying railway companies, and building international support. He wasn't alone in recognizing the problem. American educator, Charles Dowd had proposed a time zone system as early as 1870. In Cleveland Abbey, a government meteorologist had encountered the chaos firsthand when trying to coordinate observations of the Northern Lights. but Fleming's position as chief engineer of a transcontinental railway gave him the platform and credibility to push for actual implementation. The breakthrough came in 1883 when William F. Allen, secretary of the Railroad industry's general time convention in North America brokered in agreements among competing railway companies to adopt a standardized system. On November 18th, 1883, a day, that became known as the day of two Noons. American and Canadian railways simultaneously switched to four Continental time zones. Eastern Central Mountain, and Pacific At the stroke of noon along the 75th Meridian, every participating railway reset their clocks to the new standard. The change was so abrupt that some cities experienced noon twice that day as they transitioned between systems. the railway companies had moved ahead without waiting for government approval. Their success demonstrated that standardized time zones were both practical and necessary. president Chester a Arthur, recognizing the momentum issued invitations for an international conference to address the broader question of global timekeeping in October, 1884. 41 delegates from 25 nations gathered in Washington DC for the International Meridian Conference. Fleming's Proposals were central to the discussions. Though the conference became more focused on establishing a prime meridian than directly adopting time zones after considerable debate, particularly from France. Which advocated for a neutral meridian, not tied to any single nation. The conference reached a compromise. 22 nations voted to adopt the meridian passing through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England as the global standard for zero degrees, longitude, Crucially, the conference's resolutions were recommendations not binding law. The actual adoption of time zones happened gradually over subsequent decades, as individual nations chose to align their systems with Greenwich Mean time. The United States didn't legally establish time zones until 1918. France stubbornly maintained Paris mean time until 1911 and didn't fully embrace the Greenwich system until World War I. Fleming's original vision of a single cosmic time was never adopted. It proved too radical, a departure from traditional timekeeping, but his concept of 24 hourly time zones became the foundation of our modern system, his alphabetical zone labels persisted in aviation and military usage where Zulu time Z for the zero Meridian remains standard terminology. The irony is profound. A printing error on an Irish railway schedule led to the standardization of global time. Fleming's frustration with missing a single train sparked a revolution in how humanity coordinates across space and time. today, when you check your phone to see what time it is in another country, when airlines synchronize international flight schedules. When financial markets trade across continents, All of this traces back to that long night Fleming spent in a railway station refusing to accept that the world's approach to time was good enough, Sanford Fleming died in Halifax in 1915. Decades after his time zone system had been adopted worldwide. The man who missed a train because of a simple AM pm error, had given the world a gift far greater than punctuality. He had given us a common language for time itself. Brother Sanford Fleming was a member of St. Andrew's Lodge, number 16 in Toronto, Ontario. This has been another episode of the 1853 Working Tool series on Minnesota Masonic Histories and Mysteries.