Time Lord (14 page)

Seven years after those Florida nights, in the mid-1950s, my parents moved north to Pittsburgh (as it is now spelled). Since they both worked, often till midnight, I found myself going to movies three nights a week during my high school years. Movies ran continuously, like New York subways. We entered, we sat, we munched our popcorn, and we watched the movie. The moment we sat, no matter how deep into the plot it might have been, became our beginning, our prime meridian. We stayed through “The End,” but the movie’s “end” was just another meridian; we still had half a movie to go before
our
movie, our “day,” could end. We stayed through the cartoon, the news, the coming attractions, which for us were not introductions nor trailers but an interruption of the feature. For us, the opening credits came in the middle. We already knew the ending—the suspense was learning how it started. Everyone who entered as we did fashioned a different movie; they left when
their
beginning came round again, making it their end. And so, everyone in the theater watched the same movie, but also a different one, based on one’s private beginning or, in terms of this book, one’s own prime meridian. Because each of us had different plot preparation and different depths of reference, some of the audience laughed when others were sober. Some of us snickered at tender or suspenseful moments.

Was there one movie, a dozen, or a possible infinity? That’s what time had been like before the Prime Meridian Conference.

THERE CAN
be only one sunrise and one sunset per day. The rotation of the earth is “natural,” God-given, but there is no limit in theory (and sometimes in practice) to the number of hours that make up that day, or how many minutes we choose to call an hour. They are “rational,” man-made. There is nothing God-given in the length of the second, minute, or hour. Traditional Japanese timekeeping had employed flexible hours, expanding
in the summer, shortening in the winter, to keep pace with the sunrise and sunset. The French Revolution in its zeal to create a new consciousness, dictated hundred-minute hours, a twenty-hour day, the ten-day week, and twelve thirty-day months per year. Despite the appeal of decimalization, however, not even Robespierre could change the simple fact imposed by nature that each “day” marks one rotation of the earth, and that the year marks one complete orbit around the sun. And even the French Revolution could not suppress the fact that every longitude on earth experiences the sunrise at a different local time. In recognition of the French, however, it should be admitted that even though the Revolution failed to rewire the human consciousness, France never really abandoned—nor did it fail in—its overpowering ambition. In the modern world, the French mania for universal order has been rewarded. We don’t observe hundredminute hours, but we do observe universal time, such as the airlines’ Zulu time, regulated by a signal originating in Paris.

So why do we observe the Greenwich meridian, and not that of Yokohama, New York, or Buenos Aires? This was the question faced by Sandford Fleming in 1878, at the time of his second time proposal. He had abandoned the buried chronometer of his first paper, the complicated watch-faces and the interchange-ability of time and longitude. He clung only to the notion of a universal day, the twenty-four time zones and his signature twenty-four-hour clock. The popular, or democratic, answer to the question of Greenwich is that most of the world’s shipping employed Greenwich charts, which made Greenwich the obvious choice on the basis of convenience alone. So why the delay? Fleming was alert to the fact and sensitive to the feelings behind it, that the election of a British prime was sure to arouse national enmities, especially from the proud tradition that would be forced to surrender its
ligne sacrée
, the Paris meridian, nine minutes and twenty-two seconds ahead of Greenwich. The French position, which Fleming supported (up to a point) was that there should
be scientific, not merely commercial, reasons for choosing an international standard.

There were overwhelming historical, economic, and political reasons for choosing Greenwich, but
not
necessarily any compelling astronomical reason; that is, it bore no scientific rationale. No single longitudinal meridian is scientifically superior to any other, and astronomers pride themselves on a tradition of lofty disinterest in mundane affairs. Many astronomers, in fact, opposed the entire standard-time movement on the grounds that it might possibly involve them in matters they considered merely political—that is to say, unworthy. All north-south meridians are equal; it’s the east-west meridians, the latitudes, that are scientifically predetermined. No one would designate the fortieth degree of latitude as an equator, even if the majority of the world’s population lived along it. There can be only one equator, but every longitude on earth, every great arc that passes over the two poles, revolves about the sun once a day. Paris or Washington or Yokohama are no different from any place else, including the empty Pacific, so why should Greenwich be favored above any other?

The observatory at Greenwich was indeed honored and renowned (and profitable, due to the selling of its charts, the so-called ephemerides, to the 90 percent of the world’s shipping that employed them), but the national observatories in Rome, Paris, and Berlin, and the Naval Observatory in Washington were no less well-equipped. Without science to give backing to a particular meridian, there could be no “neutral” determination, and perfect scientific neutrality, not commercial popularity, was the nonnegotiable French demand before they would consider joining any international convention. That was the great challenge Sandford Fleming faced in his subsequent papers: to use the political and commercial advantages of Greenwich, yet appear
not
to use them at the same time. The drama behind the election of Greenwich, against fierce opposition as well as the rejection
of a sophisticated compromise, is the major part of the struggle for standard time. The decision would not be rendered until 1884, at the Prime Meridian Conference.

FOR THE
fifteen years between the closing of the American frontier, in 1869, and the conference, a series of proposals for reducing the number of local times was launched and debated. In 1872 Professor Charles Dowd, principal of Temple Grove Ladies’ Seminary in Saratoga Springs, New York (now Skidmore College), revised his original proposal, which had been based on the Washington meridian, and floated a five-time-zone system for North American railroads that is nearly identical to the system used today. His time zones varied each by one hour, each zone covering fifteen degrees of longitude, counting in fifteen-degree leaps westward from Greenwich. Professor Benjamin Peirce of Yale University, as the
Atlantic Monthly
had written, had also proposed a similar reform, as had Professor Abbe. Time was in the air, but all of the reforms thus far were attached to railroad use only, confined to North America, and dependent upon the still-unratified Greenwich meridian.

Dowd, Abbe, and Peirce all appeared on the verge of proposing standard time for the world, and not just for North American railroads and their passengers. But no one could imagine the mighty railroads changing their time-standards merely by crossing an arbitrary, invisible line. Railroads could change time, but time could not change railroads. By extending the fifteen-degrees-per-hour series of time zones around the world, looking beyond the Atlantic and Pacific shores of North America,
et voilà
, they would have it. But there are two very good reasons why their solutions would not have worked in 1874, and why, in fact, it would take another ten years to overcome them.

First of all, and most obviously, the most progressive American reforms were predicted on Greenwich, but Greenwich had not been agreed to by the world. The United States Navy, and its
commercial fleet, and of course Britain and its colonies all used Greenwich charts (the two countries alone accounted for nearly the entirety of Greenwich’s popularity), but ten percent of the world did not. There were, in fact, ten official prime meridians in use at the time, all of them historically justified, all with their national pride and clientele intact, which made shipping schedules nearly as confusing as catching trains. The United States was free to adopt whatever standard time it wished, of course, but it would have no relevance outside of its own territory, or the industry it was meant to serve. And, second, as extensive as North America was, it still did not have to cope with the change of dates, a date line, and where such a line might be drawn.

Dowd’s 1872 innovation had been to break with American practice by dropping the Washington meridian and adopting, or simply assuming, the Greenwich prime. Dowd, a Yale-trained professor (voted outstanding member of the class of 1857), had been provoked into action originally by those three “official” railroad clocks in the Buffalo train station reflecting Albany, Columbus, and Buffalo time. He had written, with philosophical exasperation: “The traveler’s watch was to him but a delusion; clocks at stations staring each other in the face defiant of harmony either with one another or with surrounding local time and all wildly at variance with the traveler’s watch, baffled all intelligent interpretation.” But Professor Dowd was easily dismissed as an impractical dreamer (a common designation for professors at most times in American history, and never more so than in the Gilded Age), and an outsider to the railroad fraternity. His proposals were politely listened to by William F. Allen, secretary of the American Railroad Association, and other grand-trunk managers, and shelved.

The revolution in time-reckoning on the North American continent came not through theory or governmental intervention, but by way of old-fashioned American commercial innovation. On April 8, 1883, in St. Louis, at the semiannual meeting of
the General Time Convention of the American Railroad Association, fifty managers of grand-trunk railroads voted to accept a plan put forth by their secretary, Mr. Allen. It would reduce the number of time standards in use by American railroads from nearly fifty to a mere four. Allen named them Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific, the same four names, though not the same four zones, that are used today. A fifth, that of the Canadian maritime provinces, designated Intercolonial, was added a few months later.

If ever a demonstration of temporal confusion were needed, St. Louis was the city to provide it. Delegates arriving on any of fourteen different railroads would experience the most blatant example of temporal meltdown to be found anywhere in the country. St. Louis observed six official railroad times. Although Allen’s reforms were presented to the managers as a simple business decision, history has shown that the standardization of railroad time across the continent would have fundamental implications for every part of American society. A contemporary journal hailed its implementation as “one of the most complete scientific successes of the century,” and “the first step in an inevitable process of world-time standardization.” Allen’s formula for railroad standardization in North America, however, played no role at all in the world standardization movement, partially for reasons already mentioned, and even more centrally, for the manner in which Mr. Allen designed it. The prediction of world standardization proved accurate, however, thanks mainly to the efforts of Fleming and his Washington friend, Cleveland Abbe, eleven months later.

And as for the first part of that glowing magazine quote, a claim of such scientific success deserves closer scrutiny: Darwin, Pasteur, Edison, Bell … and William F. Allen?

Allen was a trim, thirty-seven-year-old, New Jersey-born civil engineer. His father, also a civil engineer and an army officer, had been killed in the Civil War the same year Allen, at sixteen, began
work as a rodman on the Camden & Amboy. Six years later he was appointed resident engineer on the West Jersey. The manager of that line, General W. J. Sewell, was later elected to the Senate from New Jersey, and remained an important patron. Allen’s rise was a familiar pattern in that frantic, brawling, postwar, frontier-closing, land-grabbing era. Call it the Ben Franklin syndrome—a bright, self-educated, ambitious near-orphan works hard, rises early, stays late, attracts rewards and influential friends. Success came early, and conspicuously.

Allen’s temperament, “the genius of hard work,” his experience and contacts, combined to make him a formidable advocate for, and often a bulwark against, new ideas. He understood the tight fraternal nuances of railroad management and operated as the buffer between an increasingly impatient public, outraged by the dozens of competing and often unpredictable time standards, and a heedless, immensely profitable industry. Railroads were the driving force of the economy and a magnet for ambitious freebooters. The great fear of the industry was that their profits, competitive practices, and monopolistic ambitions—along with mounting complaints from manufacturers, farmers, and passengers—would attract government regulation. The frequently drawn analogy of nineteenth-century railroads to the contemporary world of computer entrepreneurs and dot-com cowboys is not misapplied. The arrogance of such industries can be annoying, but the real fear is that behemoth technologies, like the railroad, or the computer, simply obliterate earlier modes of transport or communication, leaving the public helpless, as in the case of airline passengers trapped by a snowstorm, with nowhere to go and no other way to get there. The technologies they replaced quickly became relics, museum pieces.

Over the Decade of Time, in his official capacities as secretary of the Association, as editor of
The Railroad Traveler’s Official Guide
(the rail passenger’s indispensable machete through the temporal jungle), and as a member of the American Metrological
Association, Allen had reviewed dozens of proposals for time reform. Not all of them were flawed, but every one had been rejected. Those originating from Professor Dowd, despite their cogent argumentation, detailed maps, and painstaking, station-by-station research, had been listened to tolerantly and approvingly by the railroad managers. When they were originally proposed, their solutions were deemed premature. Meltdown loomed, but had not yet occurred.