Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time

Rating:
Summary: A slice of the history of World Time
Review: Time Lord is a biography of Sir Sandford Fleming, and the story of his role in the establishment of world standard time in the latter part of the 19th century. Before the advent of world standard time, there was only "local time" - the clocks in the town squares of villages and cities everywhere were calibrated to indicate noon when the sun cast the shortest shadow locally. But rail travelers were confounded with endless time adjustment and conversion charts as they deciphered the railway's timetable. Information, such as weather data, gathered across the country via electric telegraph, required tedious timing adjustments in order to reconcile related events to a common timeline. American railroad leaders responded by establishing a system of US time zones which approximate those used to this day. But Fleming saw the time problem as not just America-wide, but global. His argument for a globe-encircling time system, comprised of a "prime" meridian and twenty-four time zones, was visionary; it not only anticipated the continent-linking undersea telegraph cable, which he saw in his lifetime, but it was in place to support the successor technology introduced by Marconi and all of its familiar descendents, including cell phones, global positioning, supersonic travel, and the internet.
The story moves with fits and starts, with major forays (linkages actually) into numerous other topics including philosophy, art, music and literature. Possibly this author, the former head of an International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, was moved to use this as an opportunity to enlighten and diversify our own thought processes and knowledge. I can only say that if the reader is simply researching the technical history of standard time, then there's a lot of ancillary material to stumble through in this book. But if the reader is more interested in studying the concept of time in general, (of which the idea of standard time represents just one facet) then this author accomplishes that goal in this book and as well provides numerous springboards for the continuation of that study.

Rating:
Summary: A slice of the history of World Time
Review: Time Lord is a biography of Sir Sandford Fleming, and the story of his role in the establishment of world standard time in the latter part of the 19th century. Before the advent of world standard time, there was only "local time" - the clocks in the town squares of villages and cities everywhere were calibrated to indicate noon when the sun cast the shortest shadow locally. But rail travelers were confounded with endless time adjustment and conversion charts as they deciphered the railway's timetable. Information, such as weather data, gathered across the country via electric telegraph, required tedious timing adjustments in order to reconcile related events to a common timeline. American railroad leaders responded by establishing a system of US time zones which approximate those used to this day. But Fleming saw the time problem as not just America-wide, but global. His argument for a globe-encircling time system, comprised of a "prime" meridian and twenty-four time zones, was visionary; it not only anticipated the continent-linking undersea telegraph cable, which he saw in his lifetime, but it was in place to support the successor technology introduced by Marconi and all of its familiar descendents, including cell phones, global positioning, supersonic travel, and the internet.
The story moves with fits and starts, with major forays (linkages actually) into numerous other topics including philosophy, art, music and literature. Possibly this author, the former head of an International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, was moved to use this as an opportunity to enlighten and diversify our own thought processes and knowledge. I can only say that if the reader is simply researching the technical history of standard time, then there's a lot of ancillary material to stumble through in this book. But if the reader is more interested in studying the concept of time in general, (of which the idea of standard time represents just one facet) then this author accomplishes that goal in this book and as well provides numerous springboards for the continuation of that study.