Sir Sandford Fleming, engineer and timekeeper

Picture from McCord Museum, Montreal

In 1885 with the driving of the last spike in the BC interior, the CPR, the Canadian Pacific Railway, was complete. A shining ribbon of steel stretched from Atlantic to Pacific, ready to carry passengers wherever they wanted to go, and deliver freight back and forth across a vast new nation.

Just one little problem. What time would the next train arrive? Nobody knew for sure, and somebody had to figure it out. That somebody was Sandford Fleming. He was instrumental in building Canada's railways, and he called them, with the telegraph lines that followed, "the twin agencies of civilization." (Dictionary of Canadian Biography.)

In the 19th Century, Fleming was Canada's top railway engineer, and he had an idea about how to ensure that people would know when to expect the trains. As different places still kept local time, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of schedules and trains.

During the railroad building era, the American Society of Civil Engineers was dominated by railwaymen. In 1881 it made Fleming chair of the Standing Committee on time. He carried out surveys, created proposals and achieved consensus. In 1883, North American railways adopted the one-hour time zones we still use, but there was still no international standard.

The Meteorological Society and the ASCE persuaded the US Congress to call an international meeting to decide the location of the Prime Meridian. As a member of the British delegation, Fleming alone arrived with a position paper, which was endorsed for the most part. By century's end, most major countries had accepted the standard time zones with Greenwich, England as the Prime Meridian.

After her retired from railway design, Fleming became Chancellor at Queen's University in Kingston, where he worked at scientific projects and wrote.

During his lifetime, Fleming was given many honours: Columbia University in New York, St. Andrews in Scotland, the University of Toronto and Queens and all awarded him honorary doctorates. Fleming College in Peterborough, Ontario and Sir Sandford Fleming Elementary School in Vancouver are two schools that bear his name. He was also a Member of the Royal Society, and was knighted in 1897. Fleming died in 1915 in Halifax.

In 2010, Michael Enright of CBC blogged from the train as he retraced some of Fleming's 1872 journey on the Ocean, the train that runs from Halifax to Montreal.