Time Lord (2 page)

And one should not ignore the lesson of his teacher, the land surveyor he had left behind in Kirkcaldy. John Sang and his sons remained an important force in Fleming’s life. Kirkcaldians remembered Sang as “a practical and mechanical genius” (such praise fairly defines the social ideal of Victorian Britain), with a particular aptitude for turning out engineering students. His
headquarters were more a technical college than a surveyor’s office. He invented an instrument—an elaborate gauge, a converter with a readout—for automatically measuring acreage from a map, by tracing the perimeter of the area in question.

Sang’s invention—and Fleming’s more abstract inventions for world standard time—were rooted in the Victorian era’s great facility and fascination with gauges, which are more than simple needles on a graduated dial. Steam power, the primary energy source of Fleming’s day, was inherently dangerous and demanded constant attention, the gauge being the only practical way of monitoring internal heat and pressure.

The gauge is an intricate conversion device, a kind of translator between unspoken languages. Scales, thermometers, watches, fuel pumps and all their myriad applications are gauges, instantly declaring the equivalence of disparate and invisible events. “You’ve lost weight … you have a fever … you’re running low … you’ve got ten minutes …” Like crude computers, they monitor one set of operations and convert it to a different data flow—to time, to temperature, to volume, to cost, to profit, to depletion. Any new invention with the hope of catching on in the nineteenth-century marketplace fairly bristled with valves, and glittered with elaborate brass displays, like the illustrations accompanying Jules Verne’s undersea and lunar adventures or, much later, the time machine of H. G. Wells. They allowed Victorians to read, and to trust what they couldn’t see. The Steam Age was the Age of the Gauge, a technology of convertibilities, which also had a strong influence on the standard time movement.

Sang’s story would end unhappily. In later years, he counted himself a “coward” for not going to Canada, where Fleming had offered to set him up, or to Wisconsin, where other Kirkcaldians had settled. From two lives that began so much alike, two very different destinies can be traced: those who left and those who
stayed. John Sang and his sons lost everything they’d built, they sold their instruments and declared bankruptcy, ending up working for others, copiers and deed certifiers, in a Belfast office.

By contrast, Fleming’s life is a story of ever-growing success. Five years after arriving in Peterborough, and then Toronto, he had made his mark as a surveyor and lithographer. He took the first soundings of Toronto harbor and struck the first map of the city’s streets, including the harbor and beaches, then wrote papers on the geologic history of Lake Ontario and its successive prehistoric ledges. He lithographed other surveys of Ontario towns, selling copies both remarkably accurate and artful. He was a fine amateur artist and often illustrated his own work. From surveying he made the logical leap to civil engineering, built railroads, designed and engraved the first Canadian postage stamp (the “Beaver,” valued for its industry and engineering skills, not its pelt), and founded the Canadian Institute (which grew into the Royal Society of Canada), where he would deliver most of his scientific addresses, including the classic papers on standard time. He wrote a dozen books, served thirty-five years as titular Chancellor of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario (in preparation for which he cited his six years of training in a Scottish town school), devised and facilitated world standard time and, finally, the world-circling sub-Pacific cable, which earned him his knighthood in 1897.

The
Montreal Gazette
characterized him, late in life, as “a man not happy without some great reform.” Among these were: the Presbyterian prayerbook; metric/imperial unification (urging the French, with predictable results, to raise the meter’s length to forty inches from 39.37, so that the systems could be made fully convertible); proportional parliamentary representation; and stock-market accountability. With a membership in over seventy international societies, he was for half a century Canada’s voice on the world stage. For all of that, at the moment of his greatest success, the Prime Meridian Conference, which he had orchestrated,
he suffered a failure, a bitter failure, partly of his own making.

THE SUBJECT
of time holds a universal fascination, but this particular inquiry is also inspired by the appeal of one man and his age. Sandford Fleming put me in touch not only with the richness of the Victorians, our direct ancestors, but also with the country of my parents and of nearly half my life. Today, the differences between Canada and the United States are small indeed, but such was not the case a century and a quarter ago. My niche in the writing world has been to mark and measure those disappearing distinctions.

I turned sixty years old while writing this book, but I am still the avid child listening to his mother’s stories of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and still uncovering the untold tales of his father’s Quebec. As I sifted through the boxes of Fleming letters in the National Archives, I could hear their long-dead voices afresh, and kept repeating the mantra that informs so much of this book:
it’s about time
. It’s all about time.

AN OBVIOUS
question demands to be answered from the outset: Can
anyone
have a definition of time? Time is invisible and indescribable, endlessly fascinating and universally compelling. Time is everywhere; thus nowhere. It animates the world, yet nothing survives it. We can only guess how it started, or when it will end. It is our intimate assassin. One thing it lacks, however, except in Greek myth, is a compelling narrative.

Natural time—the time of the gods, the sun and the moon—starts in a savage, glorious myth and ends on an Irish railway platform in 1876, when Sandford Fleming missed his train. Originally, Time was embodied in a god, Uranus. He ruled over an immutable world. His children were the seven visible planets. Acting on a prophecy that his life was in danger from one of them, Uranus did the natural thing and slaughtered them all. Their mother, his sister Gaia, was able to hide one son, Kronos. Kronos, upon maturity, did the natural thing—castrated and killed his father. He married his sister, Rhea. When he learned of a plot against him, he cannibalized his children, but for Zeus, whose sleeping body Rhea had replaced with a stone. Zeus, of course, would castrate and kill his father.

Time is a bloodthirsty savage. None of us gets out alive, regardless of piety, decency, beauty, or innocence. But Zeus, at least, made it tolerable by setting the clock of mortality and mutability.
We die, but we are replaced. Our children do supplant us; and they bury us. They can’t admit it, but
they want their parents dead
. And parents can’t admit it, but
they want their children forever helpless and dependent
. So long as they remain babies, we stay in our virile prime. Their maturing is our death. Mutability saves us from unthinkable violence, at the cost of our own life. I can’t imagine a more ethically charged dilemma.

The powers of Time were scattered. Different gods attended to prophecy, history, fate, and dreams. Priestly castes learned the natural periodicities of the days, months, and years and determined rituals and sacrifices required for harvests, protection from floods, and return of the rains. Natural time is cyclical, a closed system, not admitting to change. Gods of the natural world are mysterious, unknowable, and violent. Any variation in worship might—or might not—bring instant death.

The collapse of “natural” thinking was most sudden, and most dramatic, in England. It was in England that the Romantic embrace of nature reached doctrinal intensity, where rambles in the Lake District inspired poetry, where the great and permanent forms of nature were invoked as guides in time of crisis and despair. One thinks of nature’s power not only to soothe but to inspire reveries of timelessness, as in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1818). But England soon embraced the Industrial Revolution with even deeper fervor, so that within little more than a generation, the nation had been transformed into a virtual laboratory for creative destruction. Thirty years after Keats’s ode, in
The Communist Manifesto
, time became cheaper than sand, not dearer than gold, a servant, not a master. It could be leased back to an employer at a fair rate and for a set duration, or even confiscated by the proposed new state on the behalf of labor. The social structure and the political order were transformed, but not by Marx and Engels. The revolutionary agent was speed, the new velocity introduced by trains and the telegraph. If industrialism and rationality teach anything, it is that nothing is permanent,
especially nothing found in nature. There is no “natural” law. Displaying gratitude for the gods’ gift of time became less important than showing up punctually for a day’s work and collecting a guaranteed wage at the end of the week. Standard time, which also arrived in Britain in 1848, is the ultimate expression of human control over the apparently random forces of nature.

WRITERS WHO
find themselves fascinated by some aspect of time usually confess their inadequacy, or their confusion, by invoking St. Augustine’s famous admission in his
Confessions
. It reads in essence: “I know what time is, but when I try to describe it, I cannot.” That leaves quite an opening for anyone who would rise to the challenge. The English historian Simon Schama, in the opening of
Landscape and Memory
, speaks directly to the issue:

The American physicist George Smoot, combining astrophysics with autobiography, begins his
Wrinkles in Time
on a simpler note: “There is something about looking at the night sky that makes a person wonder.” A few sentences later, he brings that childhood wonder up to date:

Fiction writers attracted to time can only envy historians and astronomers. Time, after all, is their raw material. Novelists are no less wonder-struck, no less time-besotted, and no less driven to fit things together, but their tool is the story, the actors and plot. Their approach lies closer to the way of sociology and psychiatry (or perhaps forensic science), stopping time, fragmenting it, backing it up, moving it forward, examining the pieces. Time lacks that narrative base, it is so nebulous that it might evade definition all together, by anyone. “Time is like Oakland,” the sociologist Murray Davis once said, echoing Gertrude Stein, “there’s no
then
there.”

First of all, time comes in two distinct varieties: the untamed, mysterious Time, born with the big bang itself, and civil, obedient standard time, as in “What time is it?” or “How long has this been going on?” It’s not clear that the same word even applies to both, or what the nature of their relationship, if any, might be. Perhaps time should have two names, like “horse” and “equus,” the one to stand for hardworking, domesticated time, that which we control and can describe—the calendars, clocks, minutes and hours of the civil day—and the other for the untamed and un-namable, that which nature has not yet released.

The cesium-ion atomic clock is so accurate that it “loses” only one second every ten thousand years, and even that exact standard is open to further precision. It divides each second into more than twenty billion pulses. But what exactly is it dividing, what is it measuring, what is a second, what is a minute? And if we “lose” it, where does it go? When basketball games are won or lost in the final seconds, or when downhill ski races and Olympic dashes are decided by tenths, hundredths, thousandths, or ten-thousandths of a second, are we honoring accuracy or exposing
the arbitrary nature of measurement, the meta-measuring of measurement itself? It seems apparent that some contests are not won or lost in head-to-head competition, but in the anachronism of relying on a starter’s pistol, our inability to mark a true beginning—or, in terms of this book, our failure to fix a proper prime meridian. A smart lawyer could argue that a runner lined up in an outer lane, twenty yards away from the starter’s pistol, hears it a significant thousandth of a second later than a runner five or six lanes closer.