Time Lord (19 page)

Fleming was now through four of his topics (I’ve focused mainly on the fourth), but the fifth was, potentially, even more unsettling. In fact, it touched on a central conflict that would not be resolved until the Prime Meridian Conference in 1884, and then only in rancor. Part five: How to extend the advantages of standard time at sea?

“Navigators are required to employ a standard time to enable them from day to day, when on long voyages, to compute their longitude,” Fleming began. The trouble, of course, lay in the multiplicity of prime meridians. Each ship derived its time from the prime meridian of the national observatory in the country of its registry. There were eleven national prime meridians—Paris, Greenwich, Rio, St. Petersburg, Rome, Lisbon, Cádiz, Berlin, Tokyo, Copenhagen, and Stockholm—from which ships derived their bearings at sea. Ships from different nations passing at sea could not communicate the location of mutual dangers, since British (and American) ships drew their charts and astronomical observations (their ephemerides) from a Greenwich prime, which was unintelligible to ships of other nationalities. The terrestrial marker proposed by Fleming would eliminate diverse meridians in favor of a single one, and, as he had already indicated, it really didn’t matter which meridian that might be. (All nations, however, had to agree to it.) Yokohama or Greenwich, it was all the same, so long as it was consistently applied by ships of all nations.

The problem with Fleming’s time proposals, even after he’d simplified them and done away with the imaginary time monitor in the center of the earth, and the dual-track clock-face, always lay with finding a universally acceptable prime meridian. All
meridians were equal, they all measured the same rotation of the earth that we call a day—but some meridians were culturally and commercially more equal than others. Left to a popular vote, Greenwich would doubtless win, since 90 percent of the world’s shipping already employed it. Even the American railroads, as well as the country’s military and commercial fleet, ran on Greenwich time. But popularity alone did not necessarily recommend Greenwich to Fleming; quite the contrary, in fact, since the British meridian, as we have seen, lacked the neutrality he considered essential to a truly universal solution.

What Fleming proposed would be considered revolutionary, even today. Of course there would be a twenty-four-hour clock. There would be two time-tracks: local (such as we have today), designated by numbers; and terrestrial (which would regulate all maritime and continental rail activity and all communications), designated by letters. This, too, if we think of the airlines’ Zulu time, based on Universal Coordinated Time, we have adopted for technical use. And here, Fleming remains our contemporary. Clearly, we are moving toward a single, uniting time. (The Swatch company, Swiss watchmakers, have even proposed an Internet Time that is also universal, allowing users in various parts of the world to bypass time zones and rendezvous in the same “real” time.)

That is, many millions need a local time for setting their dental appointments or movie starts, but otherwise live within a computer-driven universal standard of time. Cosmic time in the 1870s was a giant scheme for the capturing of real time. Telegrams would be sent at, say, M.13 and arrive at T.22, and both the sender and receiver would know precisely when they had been received. A telegram sent from London to, say, Denver, would show an apparent lapse of seven hours, and a few minutes. Actually, the two times are occurring at the same “cosmic” instant. The actual local time, either of transmission or reception, was irrelevant.
Cleveland Abbe would not have to translate those dozens of weather-data telegrams into Washington time.

In 1876 Fleming had yet to work out the role of Greenwich (if any) in his universal scheme; hence that hypothetical timekeeper in the center of the earth. Clearly, given its “popularity,” the Greenwich meridian could not be ignored in any eventual calculation. The challenge was how to make use of the Greenwich meridian
without
involving England. An interesting intellectual puzzle, and in 1878, when Fleming returned in earnest to the question of standard time, he came up with a suitably elegant solution. When is Greenwich not Greenwich? The answer is simple: when it is the “anti-prime” of Greenwich—not the zero degree of Greenwich, but the one hundred and eightieth degree, the continuation of the Greenwich meridian on the far side of the earth. In other words, Greenwich is not Greenwich—though it keeps all the ephemerides of Greenwich—when the anti-prime (or the “nether arc”) cuts through “the unpopulated Pacific and over the icy steppes of Siberia,” affecting no one, more or less, and arousing no national susceptibilities. The Colonial Office was suitably impressed, the papers were translated and circulated to the world’s astronomers, and Fleming was invited to deliver the paper to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, meeting that year in Dublin—and waited and waited, unsummoned.

A veiled demand for intellectual restitution is inherent in all of his succeeding papers, as well as in his final CPR engineer’s report of 1879, in which he announced the idea of a sub-Pacific cable linking London through Canada to Australia. Railroads were fast, but the cable was faster, and Fleming had caught the fever of instantaneous connection. Railroads, he noted, were composed of two distinct technologies, the rails and the telegraph. They followed one another, and in fact rails could not function adequately without the telegraph. But cables were infinitely
faster and more adaptable. The moment had come, now that the rails were in sight of the ocean, to continue the cables under the Pacific, just as they had already crossed the Atlantic. Vancouver would be connected to Fiji and Australia, Australia with India and South Africa. A glance at any map confirmed the fact that the red patches on the earth, the British Empire, fairly begged for connection. Without abandoning standard time, he would now take up the final great scheme of his life, the laying of the trans-Pacific and worldwide, all-British cable.

His vision had always been one of one-world and instantaneous communication. The time zones were but a rough sketch of what he next planned to do. What good is time if it can’t be put to work?

IN
1895 Sandford Fleming, then sixty-eight years old and on the brink of achieving the great success for which he would be knighted two years later, was visiting County Mayo, Ireland. He was in Britain to check on the funding and the progress of his trans-Pacific cable. Of a small encounter that followed, he wrote:

Miraculous as it must have seemed at the time, it is about as far as the marriage between steam and electricity can be pushed. The coordinated efforts involved, brought into focus that day, are also indicative of the mechanical disadvantage of steam technology, then entering its unacknowledged decline. The diesel engine had been invented two years earlier, the telephone was already widely in use, and the compact power of electricity was all the rage, from incandescent lights to the phonograph, oscillating fans, and motion pictures. Mr. Marconi’s wireless transmissions would leap the Channel just a year after the worldwide cable was up (or, more properly, down) and running. (The wireless would bridge the Atlantic within the decade.) Had Fleming been listening, he might have heard scurrying sounds, primitive mice under the dinosaurs’ feet.

THERE IS NO
aspect of human activity, from law and medicine to economics and aesthetics that was not permanently altered by the encounter with our golem and faithful servant, the steam locomotive. We are fond of saying that the railroad “tamed the West,” that it civilized the world, but there is a rakish counternarrative. Railroads emboldened us. The distant whistle fed our dreams, our hunger, made us, by prevailing standards, wanton. Its power knew no limit, and the power was transferable, right up the spine of the Victorian passenger. The problems they encountered learning to tame their master/slave—the speed, their dependency, the ecological damage—are our problems, too.

When speed becomes a consideration in all everyday decisions, it can be as unsettling, socially and psychologically, as speed in any athletic competition. Civil engineers, true to Sandford Fleming’s description—the straighteners and levelers—had obliterated many of the irregularities of nature. The newly invented motorcar broke the hundred-mile-an-hour barrier in competition by the turn of the century. It is the perception of movement on all fronts, like skittering pond life, that defined the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, and it is the railroad that lends itself as the single most conspicuous symbol of the Industrial Age.

The railway journey (to echo the title of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s
great social history of nineteenth-century railway travel) was a microcosm of all nineteenth-century philosophical and aesthetic debates. What is vision, what is reality, what social structures can withstand the assault of speed, what are the fixed polarities of time and space? Who are our friends? What degree of distance is advisable? If the brain were indeed equipped with innate categories of time and space, as European philosophers contended, then the railroad represented a fundamental challenge to reality. The inner clock of the European psyche became unbalanced. How much of that imbalance expressed itself as hysteria and neurasthenia in the nerve clinics of early psychiatry? Schivelbusch points out that so-called “railroad spine,” a host of symptoms without a definable cause—anxiety, sleeplessness, headache, loss of appetite, a generalized dread—yielded more to psychiatry than to traditional medicine, boosting the prestige of a field of study that had been notably lagging in popular esteem.

Even social etiquette came up for revision. In England, the easy camaraderie and crude democracy of the stagecoach that had led to those raucous
Tom Jones
moments of shared food and drink, and even to learning the coachman’s name, never carried over to the railroad compartment. The reason, initially, was fear, and for good reason. Accidents, derailments, and general discomfort were common in the early years. One rarely chats or shakes hands on a roller coaster.

And there is another reason, one that reaches by analogy into the standard-time debate. The early European rail compartment was essentially, even to its velvet plush, a traveling coffin. No way in, or out, except through the individual door leading to the platform, and no circulation through the carriage between compartments. No on-board facilities. Heating was imperfect. We might even extend the metaphor to a kind of
No Exit:
purgatorial entombment with six cigar-smoking gentlemen, some, doubtless, with food and drink, reading their newspapers. No introductions,
no stated common backgrounds or purpose. The first generation of European railway compartments were a chamber of horrors, a mode of speeded-up transport, but not yet a traveling experience (or as we’d say today, not yet a “culture of transportation”). Trains and passengers had not interiorized enough of the outer world—its sights, sounds and patterns of mobility—to make rail travel anything other than a disorienting hell on wheels.

The early years of European passenger-coach design exposed the central flaw in “natural” thought. Simply put, “natural” thinking failed to comprehend that a change in speed could not be separated from systemic upheaval, psychic rebellion. Railway carriage design in Europe owed much to the preexisting model of the stagecoach, but stagecoach atavism in an era of steam power was like repressive rule in a time of rising liberation. Speed and confinement are incompatible, except perhaps on a roller coaster. By the time the fear of speed and power was overcome (and adjustments, like the communicating corridor, were installed), a European railway etiquette of noncommunication had already evolved. Hence, the avoidance of contact, the sparse sociability, and the need (literally) for face-obscuring reading material.

In 1848 (in the wake of standardization along the Great Western), a newspaper vendor at Euston Station, Mr. W. H. Smith, began renting books to Birmingham-bound passengers. For little over a penny, they could take a book on board from his well-stocked library, read it, and then return it to his stand at the Birmingham terminus. Thus was a literature born, an extremely standardized literature, the so-called penny-dreadful, which took its place beside inexpensive editions of popular novels of the day. In France, Louis Hachette did the same, but on a grander scale, and soon British publishers were issuing special series of “literature for the rail.”

Just as W. H. Smith adopted standardization for his lending library as soon as a common standard of time was struck throughout England, so did standardization encourage a unitary vision of culture, a shared cosmopolitanism across Britain and the continent. As early as 1838, ten years into the rail revolution, magazines were discussing the shrinking of time and space, and that the “national hearth” (meaning London) was now two-thirds closer than it had been to any of its citizens. Rails sped passengers along five times faster than the fastest stagecoach, which is a prescription for social hysteria, or another way of saying that perceived distances shrank by a factor of five. Schivelbusch quotes Heinrich Heine’s almost rhapsodic 1843 embrace of the railroad’s potential: