Time Lord (28 page)

And this is where Rutherfurd’s preparation saved the conference (and the world) vast time and annoyance. He quoted from President Arthur’s follow-up letter to each foreign minister, including the French, which clearly stated the objectives of the conference. Acceptance of the invitation implied acceptance of the objectives of the conference.

Diplomatic meetings are a delicate interplay of wit and logic, bluster and modesty. France had just been unanimously defeated, the United States had mounted a brilliant defense, but Rutherfurd pushed his advantage just a bit too hard. The whole object of the conference was to fix a prime meridian; there must be some misapprehension on the part of the learned gentleman from France in thinking that this conference did not have the power to fix a prime meridian. It seemed to him that the delegates undoubtedly were ready to hear and express arguments pro and con in regard to that very question, and he supposed that every delegate had studied the matter before coming. He did not think that any delegate would be likely to have come unless he knew, or thought he knew, something about the matter.

All of which unleashed a flurry of denials from Spain, Sweden, Russia, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, and even Britain. None of them, they averred, was empowered to fix a prime—merely to recommend.

The final speaker of the second session was Sandford Fleming. He called attention to the language of the act of the U.S. Congress that had authorized the conference:

The second session ended, the Greenwich motion still in play.

In the corridor outside the doors of the closed session, Monsieur Lefaivre swore to Commander Sampson, “France will never agree to emblazon on her charts ‘degrees west or east of Greenwich’!” It was a promise, against all apparent odds, that could have been taken to the bank. France had dodged the first bullet, but the Greenwich guns would not go away. There were five days before the next session. During the break, lacking a country, and diplomatic instructions, Fleming returned to Montreal for a board meeting of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

THE THIRD
session witnessed a new French strategy, that of demanding a “neutral” prime meridian. France denied favoring a Paris prime; but she was equally opposed to any prime that carried historic importance, or conferred national advantage. If Greenwich carried the vote, British astronomers would not have to change their charts; their traditions would continue into the next century, while everyone else’s would die. France would be stripped of everything, without compensation. As Janssen put it, “Whatever we may do, the common prime meridian will always be a crown to which there will be a hundred pretenders. Let us
place the crown on the brow of science, and all will bow before it.” By “crowning science” he meant there should be no local commercial benefit attached to the designation. By “neutral” France meant that any meridian selected had to be culturally naked and not fall on the continents of Europe or America. Only an ocean-based prime, like Fleming’s anti-prime, met the standards. Fleming and France became unstable allies, one from a desire to implement standard time without dissension; the other to sidetrack the debate for as long as possible.

Arguing against neutrality, or even attempting to define it, is philosophically treacherous. (It is not the sort of argument that British and Americans make easily anyway, and it led, over the next two sessions, to flashes of anger on both sides. “Gentlemen, I remind you, we are not all belligerents,” one British delegate was forced to plead.) The moment one defines neutrality, it loses its neutral nature and takes on the national or linguistic character of the definer. Commander Sampson, no mean debater, observed: “Since France today proposed neutrality, we may conclude that they have the necessary delegated power to fully consider and determine the main question before us—the selection of a prime meridian.”

The American delegates, Abbe and Rutherfurd, asserted that neutrality, as defined by the French, was a fantasy. Every longitudinal meridian touches land at some point in its arc, and is thus rendered suspect. And if the French wanted a Pacific prime, it would still have to take its bearings from some land-based observatory, which would then render it the astronomical property of some nation. The meridian favored by France made its landfall on the Kamchatka Peninsula, just west of the Bering Strait and thus would be controlled by a Russian or American observatory. Cleveland Abbe demanded, “How long will it remain so [i.e., neutral]? Who knows when Russia will step over and reconquer the country on this side of Bering’s Strait? Who knows when America will step over and purchase half of Siberia?” And
he went on, Cleveland Abbe of the looping, ephemeral weather maps, Abbe of precision and mutability, Abbe the friend of black empowerment, the visionary: “Something must be found which is fixed, either within the sphere of the earth or in the stars above the earth.” (Global positioning might, in fact, eventually eliminate the need for an earthbound prime meridian.)

The French, now down to their fallback position, suggested that if the Anglo-Saxon countries would adopt the “neutral” metric system, France might accept an English meridian. No, Abbe repeated, even the
metre
, that one-ten millionth of the quarter-arc of the earth as measured by the French in the last century, was a
French
meter. (The Germans had recently remeasured the arc and come up with a slightly different value; thus a German meter.) An American measurement would doubtless create an American meter. All measurement is deneutralized by properties of the measurer. In any event, Admiral Rodgers ruled speculations over the meter out of order.

Failing to convince the French of the logical impossibility of their stand (“I have listened to my learned colleagues,” J. C. Adams recoiled, “and it turned almost entirely on sentimental considerations”), the combined forces of the United States and Britain then shifted the argument to terms more conducive to their own pragmatic natures. It was Commander Sampson who introduced the word that had the sanction of the President and the Secretary of State: “convenience.” Neutrality may or may not exist, but practicality does, and for the aggregate convenience of the world, only one meridian satisfies that demand. This was the course of debate that lit the fuse.

Janssen retorted: “We consider that a reform which consists in giving to a geographical question one of the worst solutions possible, simply on the ground of practical convenience; that is to say, the advantage to yourselves and those you represent, of having nothing to change, either in your maps, customs, or traditions—such
a solution, I say, can have no future before it, and we refuse to take part in it.”

After three hours of give and take, and with the original motion on Greenwich still unresolved, as well as France’s motion on absolute neutrality, the third session ended and a week’s recess was called. Of all the sessions leading up to a vote, the third was the least conclusive but the most revealing. The French position was exposed as fundamentally self-interested, and its proponents no better at defining neutrality than the British and Americans had been in attacking it. And there was genuine passion, a kind of requiem, in the French defense of what they felt to be the surrender of their noble astronomical tradition on an altar of complacent Anglo-Saxon commerce.

When the delegates reassembled a week later on October 14, the weather had turned cool and misty, all traces of summer gone. Instructions from governments had been cabled, speeches rehearsed, and the swords were out. It was Sandford Fleming, France’s erstwhile ally, who opened the argument. Pressing hard on France’s greatest sensitivity, he displayed the figures of maritime tonnage that were then employing Greenwich charts. Paris came in second, one-fourteenth the size of Greenwich. Seventy-two percent of commercial shipping used Greenwich, 8 percent used Paris. But Fleming’s purpose was not to attack Paris; rather, it was to eliminate a potential objection to his own anti-prime, which he then posed as the ideal compromise between utility (Greenwich) and utopia (neutrality). As always, he wanted the advantages of Greenwich, without calling it by the dread name.

His intervention was not warmly received. The French chose to see it as coming close to a parody of the classic split between two philosophical traditions: the sleek, rationalist vessel of polished
discours
rammed by the rusty coal barge of British empiricism. Finally, out of frustration, anger, and self-pity, the French gave up and called for a vote on the neutral meridian, which
was defeated, 21–3. Fleming’s compromise, had the French accepted it, was logical, even virtuous. The anti-prime retains all the charts of Greenwich, but removes from them the taint of a British connection. But the French refused to accept the argument; they saw the anti-prime as still infected by the English contaminant. The atmosphere had grown poisonous, and the British-American axis had been encouraged by the final vote, to adopt a triumphalist pose. Rutherfurd immediately renewed his Greenwich motion, Fleming amended it to leave room for his own anti-prime—to call it the “great circle” of Greenwich—but the British delegates, Evans, Strachey, and Adams, revolted against their Canadian member, announcing that they renounced Fleming’s position. Fleming’s amendment lost, and the rest is part of our common history. Even his later time-zone recommendations were ruled out of order. The French, and Fleming, lost.

And while he was at it, Rutherfurd exposed one rather obvious flaw in Fleming’s carefully worked-out proposal. He pointed out that a Pacific prime would have disastrous effects on London, and Western Europe in general. If the anti-prime became the prime, Greenwich would become the anti-prime. At noon every day, England would be split into separate days. Clearly it was preferable to change the world date in the unpopulated Pacific than in the middle of the largest city in the world.

Greenwich passed. The world day, the counting of time zones, the astronomer’s day, all civil time for all societies begins at midnight on the Greenwich meridian. Fleming’s anti-prime disappeared, only to be resurrected at a later date as the international date line. It was left to the Russian ambassador (and amateur astronomer), Charles de Struve, to clean up computational anomalies left in the wake of the Greenwich selection. First of all, he proposed the rescinding of the Rome accord on the universal day (one of the last Fleming initiatives still standing). The universal day should begin at the Greenwich midnight, not noon, for the avoidance of double-counting the dates in Europe
and North America. The Russian deserves credit for the east-west division of longitudes, 180 degrees east and west from the zero meridian, also an overturning of a Fleming-supported Rome agreement. Otherwise, Greenwich would have been in the anomalous position of lying, simultaneously, on the zero
and
the 360th degree of longitude. Villages a few miles west of Greenwich would carry unwieldy coordinates like 359 degrees west longitude, while neighboring towns a few miles east might lie at two degrees.

To de Struve also goes the credit for unifying the astronomer’s day with the civil day (“We think it easier for the astronomers to change the starting point, and to make allowance for the twelve hours of difference in their calculations, than it would be for the public and for the business men, if the date for the universal time began at noon, and not at midnight”) and, perhaps most significantly, for the creation of the all-important international date line (“the change of the day of the week, historically established on or about the anti-meridian of Greenwich, should henceforth take place exactly on that meridian”). He supported the adoption of the universal day (clause five of the Rome Conference), “side by side with the local time, for international telegraphic correspondence, and for through international lines by railroads and steamers.” And he warmly supported Fleming’s beloved twenty-four-hour clock. And so Sandford Fleming’s great adventure had come full circle.

And why, I ask myself, did Fleming, and the French, lose so profoundly? In Rome, an understanding had been struck that England and America would give serious thought to adopting the metric system (it is still the legal standard in both countries, and was nearly enacted in the United States in the last century) in return for French acquiescence to Greenwich. That hope, along with the support shown in Rome for the anti-prime, certainly motivated French participation in the Washington Conference.

But why did Fleming fail to see the flaws in his position?
Blinded by vanity and ambition? Overmatched, finally, by the world’s scientific and diplomatic elites? I think not. The French (and Fleming) were correct to insist on a “scientifically” derived prime. Science says only that all meridians are equal, and if the maritime tonnage alone is to settle the issue, then the conference need not to have been called in the first place. The French (and Fleming) were also correct to downplay the need for a first-class observatory on that prime, and correct to show faith in the accuracy of modern telegraphy. But the French were even more committed to scientific neutrality than Fleming; he, after all, was a secret partisan of preserving Greenwich charts for his anti-prime proposal.

It was politics that had given momentum to the concept of convenience. The indelicate French response, that the proud traditions of ten nations were to be sacrificed to the size of another meridian’s clientele, points out a serious flaw. If convenience and popularity were the only standards that matter, then science had been replaced by political power, and by commercial mandate. For many reasons, the Prime Meridian Conference can be seen as one of the first “modern” moments in science.