Canadian Inventions – Standard Time (Sir Sandford Fleming)

One of the most difficult persons in our series of inventive Canadians to categorize, but also one of the most successful in his own era was Sir Sandford Fleming (1827-1915): a civil engineer, a railway builder, a scientist, and the inventor of Standard Time. Born and educated in Scotland, Fleming arrived with a brother and cousin in 1845 and first settled in the small Ontario city of Peterborough, where he was employed as a surveyor, obtaining his Ontario certification in 1849. In one of his many accomplishments, although not directly related to engineering and science, in 1851 Fleming designed the Threepenny Beaver, Canada’s first postage stamp, which would do much to popularize the beaver as a national symbol. In the same year, the Royal Canadian Institute was incorporated, although it had been formed by Fleming two years earlier when he was the ripe age of 22! The following year, 1852, Fleming began his long career in the railway sector as an assistant design engineer on the Ontario, Simcoe and Huron Union Railway being built from Toronto to Georgian Bay. Fifteen years later, he would become engineer-in-chief of the Intercolonial Railway, linking Central Canada to the Maritimes, a linchpin of the movement for Canadian Confederation (1867), although the railway was not fully completed until the late 1870s (wikipedia tells us that this was the largest Canadian public works project of the 19th Century). In the 1870s and 1880s, Fleming was at the forefront of the strategy of railway building that helped to bring British Columbia into Confederation and later to span the continent with the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. In the iconic photograph shown below of the Last Spike being driven by the CPR President, Donald Smith, at Craigellachie, BC (November 7, 1885), the imposing figure wearing the tall hat and standing immediately behind Smith is Sandford Fleming. As often occurs in the world of inventions, it was a personal experience that spurred Fleming to consider the question of standardized time measurement – he had missed a train in Ireland because of its faulty timetable. At the time, major cities and regions generally set their time in accordance with the local astronomical conditions they observed, resulting in the existence of an inordinate number of local times, with no assured uniformity whatever among them. However, once the railways became a dominant force in society, and travelers could move from one city to another relatively quickly, this lack of a universal standard was no longer acceptable. Fleming proposed a single 24-hour clock for the whole world at a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute on February 8, 1879. By 1929, all major countries had accepted time zones based on these principles. The pervasive and strong linkage between Standard Time and the railways is illustrated by the fact that, until the 1960s, passenger train schedules in Canada used Standard Time year around, even though in the summer months virtually all other institutions, public and private, and the general population, advanced their clocks one hour and used Daylight Savings Time. In 1880, Fleming retired from surveying and became the Chancellor of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, a post he held for 35 years. In later life, he became a strong advocate for a trans-Pacific submarine telegraph cable. A fact that no doubt would please Fleming is that many towns, streets and landmark buildings throughout Canada are named after him. Summary by: Richard Potter