Time Lord (11 page)

The burden was entirely on the passenger. Railroad companies
owned the time. Upon entering larger stations where a transfer between lines might be necessary, American passengers would study clocks set along a wall behind the ticket counter, each announcing the time standards of competing “roads.” The clocks would not read: “New York,” “Chicago,” “New Orleans,” and “Cincinnati,” but rather, “Erie & Lackawanna,” “New York Central,” and “Baltimore & Ohio.” Each separate time reflected the standard at the company’s headquarters. The Pennsylvania Railroad maintained Philadelphia time along its entire route, while New York Central kept the “Vanderbilt time” of Grand Central Station. If a passenger wondered when he might arrive at his final destination, he had to know the time standard of the railroad that was taking him there, and make the proper conversion to the local time at his boarding, and that of his eventual descent.

For example, if you were a Philadelphia businessman in the 1870s with an appointment to keep in Buffalo, transferring in Pittsburg (as it was then spelled), you would of course have to know the departure time in Philadelphia local time (just as you would today)—
unless
the train had originated in Washington or New York, in which case it might depart according to the local time of those stations, a few minutes earlier or later than your local Philadelphia time. It was your responsibility to know the difference. Thereafter, you entered a twilight zone of competing times.

Pittsburg, five degrees of longitude west of Philadelphia, adhered to the sundial precision of its solar noon, which came twenty minutes after Philadelphia’s. The train you’d catch in Pittsburg to take you up to Buffalo originated, however, in Columbus, Ohio, three degrees west of Pittsburg. That translated to twelve minutes earlier than local Pittsburg time, or thirty-two minutes earlier than the time on your still-uncorrected Philadelphia watch. A train arriving in Pittsburg from Philadelphia at five o’clock Philadelphia time would find that it was only 4:40 in Pittsburg (which was irrelevant, unless you were leaving the station
and staying in the city), but that the Columbus train would be arriving twelve minutes before that, at 4:28 Columbus time. And when you finally arrived in Buffalo (assuming you didn’t miss your train), you’d be confronted with Buffalo’s three official times, based on the three railroads that served the city—a philosophical conundrum that had, in fact, spurred Professor Charles Dowd’s first serious attempt, in 1869, at temporal rationalization. For Dowd, the temporal conflicts created absurdity. Passengers were made hyperconscious of time, of each passing minute, in ways we cannot imagine today. For many passengers, it created anxieties bordering on agony.

No wonder Oscar Wilde, the serenely contemptuous child of British standard time, noted that the chief occupation in an American’s life was “catching trains.” No wonder Sandford Fleming cautioned against even the mention of “local time.”

All of those times, in Pittsburg, Buffalo, and Philadelphia, were occurring at the same cosmic instant. But whose “now” are we talking about? It depended on what “now” meant. “Now” was composed of three, six, fifty, an infinity of separate times, all of them official, all of them accurate. Today, all three times are in the Eastern time zone; one time fits all. For the gentleman of the 1870s, however, right up to the moment of North American railroad standardization, in 1883 (a year before the world conference), all three times were legitimately (one might even say, morally) distinct. It was up to the traveler—he who would pierce the twelve-mile-wide bubble of local time—not the railroad, to make the adjustment.

The helpless passenger didn’t yet realize it, of course, but his frustrations had already ignited furious debates behind the scenes. Railroad men, astronomers, grand theorists, diplomats, all quickened to notions of time and new ways of reckoning it. It was a reformer’s cause, an opportunity to sweep away the residual pieties of a “natural” mind-set. Standard time, given the nature of its opposition from religious thinkers, agrarian traditionalists,
and the contented, nontraveling public, became a popular symbol of progress and rationality.

Passengers were demanding something simpler. Proposals were raining down on the engineering profession, the railroad industry, the post and telegraph services. The American Metrological Society (measure reformers), the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Railroad Association, all maintained “time conventions” to monitor their members’ suggestions for purposes of advocating positions, placating the public, and thwarting political intervention. Some of the proposals they studied and even debated were ingenious. Some, in fact, like that of the very persistent Professor Dowd, were prescient. But the railroad industry, rather like today’s Internet, was terrified of government intervention—lest public frustration boil over and attract political involvement—and loath to interfere with its own profitability and entrepreneurial independence.

Within the Decade of Time, the contradictions between new technology and old time-reckoning passed from inconvenience and inefficiency to urgency and, finally, to danger.

Ships of different nationalities could not communicate their positions at sea, due to competing prime meridians. Railroad accidents were daily events, an inevitability considering that trains on the same track might be employing different times. Meanwhile, the technology continued to evolve; the velocity of the culture continued to increase.

In that decade, just to name the most obvious examples, the telephone, the electric light, the typewriter, motion pictures and stop-action photography were invented. Even military misadventure could be turned to creative use. In 1871, upstart Prussia defeated France, throwing a proud culture into despair, but forcing a thorough self-examination and restructuring. From that fortunate defeat arose the determination to revolutionize institutions and to create new centralized and “rational” authority to cast off the dead weight of “natural” thought. France built a modern industrial
state and unleashed energy that made Paris synonymous with art, culture, experimentation, and revolution. Baron Haussmann redesigned the medieval metropolis, replacing stagnant quarters with broad, railroad-style boulevards.

In the United States, because of their superior bogie-design, luxurious Pullman cars were carrying passengers from the Atlantic to the Pacific, offering greater comfort on the move than most Americans enjoyed in their homes. Sumptuous steamliners plied the Atlantic in little more than a week, which registered on veterans of the sailing days as instantaneous. Starting in Belgium and spreading quickly to Germany and France, Georges Nagelmackers’s
wagon-lit
(sleeping-car) service, importing the bogie, was by 1883 serving chilled champagne and hors d’oeuvres of oysters and caviar followed by a full five-star Paris restaurant meal, with the same formal dress code, on the fabled Orient Express all the way from Paris to Istanbul.

By the end of the decade, then, ordinary man had become superman, speaking over distances, banishing the dark, chilling his wine and beer, and speeding through immemorial landscapes—the buffalo-dotted prairies, southeastern Europe—without regard to local time or outside conditions. Our modern world, for better and worse, was taking shape. Ancient empires were collapsing, particularly in the lawless Balkans. Many of the smaller towns along the Orient Express lines had to be bypassed, not that the passengers noticed, on account of firebombed stations or the murder of crossing guards. The imperial land-grab in Africa and Asia entered its sociopathic phase in the Congo, Tanganyika, and Tonkin, and el-Mahdi was chasing the British and poor Gordon Pasha out of the Sudan, destroying forever the early Victorian pretense of a “civilizing mission.”

New fields of inquiry turned the techniques of stop-action photography of Eadweard Muybridge, who developed cameras with shutter speeds of
¹
/
₂₀₀
and
¹
/
₅₀₀
of a second, on human behavior itself. Sociology and psychology fragmented time into
investigative frames, showing, through microanalysis, the irrational to be familiar, and the “normal” to be nothing less than bizarre. Individuals learned they were strangers to their own motivations; societies were seen as structured around prejudice, superstition, and irrationality. In American factories, Frederick W. Taylor introduced “scientific management,” using the stopwatch instead of a stop-action camera to reduce the “natural” habits of laboring men and women to microanalyzable segments, with an aim toward improving productivity by replacing natural routine with rational efficiency. In painting, the impressionists broke with the careful perspective and shadowing of the Salon, the calculated posing and anecdotal portraiture, favoring instead bright shards of pure, unmodulated color, the painterly equivalent of stop-action. Impressionism is as much about time as it is about light. It’s all about time.

Writers came later to change, as befits the reflective and reportorial nature of their art, but once they felt themselves in control of time, free to experiment with sequencing, able to shatter “natural” consecutivity, their works grew closer to the stop-and-go flow of consciousness itself. Temporal distortion became the surest way of communicating disturbance, urgency. Readers were stimulated into active involvement. Unbalancing the reader was not merely an instinctive political act, but a proper aesthetic tool for keeping the naked consciousness in focus, free of all that fussy Victorian decor. Conventional plotting, in fact, was regarded as mimicking the path of unconscious repression.

All these innovations and inventions derive from, or helped to create, an altered relationship to time that we call modernism. It’s easy to trace the effects of time, a little harder to find the moment when it started. The grand events enumerated above all had their modest origins. Ross Winans’s invention of the bogie; George Pullman’s designing—and nearly over-designing for the track bed and existing gauges—the heavy funeral cortege for Abraham Lincoln; the idea for the
wagon-lit
coming to Georges
Nagelmackers when he was sent from Belgium to the United States to forget a failed love affair—only to fall in love with Pullman cars instead; van Gogh’s seeing an exhibit of Japanese woodcuts in Antwerp and falling in love with their pure color and spatial foreshortening. Any number of artists saw Eadweard Muybridge’s panel of stop-action photos of a galloping horse (and a genre of horse-racing paintings died on the spot). Other painters took from physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey’s moving pictures the theory of the persistence of vision. There are obviously dozens of such moments, and cases can be made for each of them as the ur-moment in the birth of a new consciousness.

Central to all of them, however, is the need for a catalyst, an interactive but noncontributing agency, and that, I feel, is the set of preconditions that I’ve been calling the standardization of time: adjusting time to new velocities, distributing it equally, replacing nature with reason, religion with humanism. The logical places to look for it are London, Berlin, Vienna, and, of course, Paris.

Older and more settled, now with a country and many projects behind him, Sandford Fleming enters the scene, in one of the least prepossessing places in the world.

AT
5:10
P.M
. on a bright, July afternoon in 1876, in the country station of Bandoran, situated on the main Irish rail line between Londonderry and Sligo, a balding figure with a salt-and-pepper mattress-stuffer of a beard and wearing a gentleman’s formal frock coat, alighted with his international traveler’s baggage from a horse-drawn taxi twenty-five minutes before the scheduled 5:35
P.M
. arrival of the Londonderry train. Clearly, an important man, a distinguished visitor. Perhaps he read a book or a paper as he waited for the train; he was not one to waste a moment. But the station remained suggestively uncrowded, most unusual for a market town on the main line, as the arrival time approached. At 5:35
P.M
. nothing came. He checked his
Irish Railroad Travellers’ Guide
again, for he was in all matters meticulous.
There was no mistake. Perhaps he then inquired of a stationmaster, or scrutinized the departure board. It would read: Londonderry 5:35
A.M
. Sandford Fleming, chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), would be a prisoner for the night in Bandoran station, and in the morning miss his ongoing connections to the ferry and to England. And in those hours a plan slowly took form.

In 1876 Fleming was forty-nine years old, “well near the meridian,” he’d noted on his birthday earlier that year, and hailing now from that raw and aspiring capital of his not-quite nation, Ottawa. His involvement with standard time, which was to begin that night in a misprint, will fill and even define the “decade of time.” Other leaders in the standard-time movement, whom he will soon meet and with whom he will correspond—and eventually lead—were academic or naval astronomers, educators, or railroad managers in charge of maintaining schedules. Fleming was more practical than academic, and more theoretically inclined than nearly all route managers. He was the government-appointed engineer-in-chief of Canada’s two major railroad-building projects, the Quebec-to-Halifax “Intercolonial” and the “national dream,” the Toronto-to-British Columbia Canadian Pacific Railway. The CPR was Canada’s major financial undertaking, upon which the survival of the nation was at stake.

Until Fleming’s first paper, which followed the Bandoran misadventure by only four months, most proposals for time reform had come from deep inside the American railroad industry and had applied themselves exclusively to the reform of North American railroad schedules. No one knew trains better than Sandford Fleming, but his proposals, from the beginning, treated the needs of the railroads as incidental to the overall regulation of time itself. Not only that, he paid no special attention to North America. He was a theorist of world time. Before that day in Ireland, time had meant no more to Fleming than it had to most busy Victorians. If he thought about the complications of solar
time, or of ways to repair them prior to his enforced stay in an Irish station, there is no evidence in his letters and journals. He’d simply soldiered on like most Victorian travelers, making rough adjustments at sea on his annual crossings to Britain, or on his surveying missions into the Canadian bush.