Time Lord (15 page)

Dowd’s proposed zones were neat, clean, and geometrical. They followed longitudinal meridians with a serene indifference to political and commercial boundaries in their path. Every fifteen degrees, starting at Greenwich, marked the center of a new hour, retaining the same minute and second. Allen’s zones, by contrast, were as fussy as a Victorian parlor. They were the result of a compromise between railroad intransigence and passenger frustration. Yet, at the end of the day, Allen was the railroad man, and his zones were more accommodating to railroad authority than to passenger convenience.

To assure his audience, he stated: “It has been my earnest endeavor to look upon this question purely with a view to the practical requirements of the railways, to pose nothing which is unprecedented, or that will bring about a condition of affairs which, viewed in its most unfavorable light as affecting the running trains, does not at present exist, or has not been already practically overcome; to avoid making the remedy worse than the disease.”

In other words, no ground-shifting proposals. He also articulated a position that can be seen as far-reaching, at least insofar as it reflects the view of the primacy of corporate authority over political jurisdiction: “From a railroad standpoint we have nothing to do with state lines or national boundaries, but must confine ourselves purely to the needs and be governed by the limitations of railway operations.” Here, Allen was running a risk of attracting government scrutiny, even in midst of the friendly, laissez-faire
style of postwar Republican presidents, none more typical than the sitting Chester A. Arthur.

In Allen’s time the public were accustomed to city, county, and state governments deciding, or at least debating, proposed changes that might have profound effects on their lives. In the case of railroad standardization, a purely “corporate” decision with enormous public consequences had been made in private, without citizen input or oversight. A fundamental reordering of every citizen’s private day was about to occur, ordered for the convenience of an interstate industry that took for granted its jurisdiction over local concerns. The lines between corporate freedom and governmental oversight were obviously hazy. Allen immediately began lobbying route managers and regional presidents. The proposals went into effect seven months later, as soon as the entire Association read them and approved.

Allen’s revisions also favored five time zones for North America, and acknowledged the Greenwich meridian; but, unlike Dowd, he’d arrived at his maps by consulting the railroad grid and noting where the preponderance of similar time standards were clustered. Thus, he constructed his own zones, reflecting as faithfully as possible the preexisting railroad operating standards so as not to inconvenience published schedules. The edges of Allen’s time zones were necessarily ragged, as they followed the existing rail lines, allowing them to retain their
time standards to their terminals, or to the next major rail junction. (In other words, they did not automatically change upon crossing an invisible meridian.) He was lenient with a number of major lines, allowing them to operate outside the stricter standards of their neighbors. Yet although Allen’s zones were pushed a little to the east of Dowd’s, in practical application the effects were very similar. The differences were more in the biographies of their devisers than in the outlines of their respective time zones.

Allen’s eastern zone, for example, ran from Maine to Detroit, then south to Bristol, Tennessee.
But …
railroads in Ohio and Pennsylvania west of Pittsburgh, and all those in Georgia, would be included in the western (i.e., central) section. Five other major railroads would be allowed to run to their eastern terminals in Buffalo, Charlotte, and Salamanca, New York, by the central time standard. Allen’s bold proposal was beginning to look nearly as complicated as the original problem; the remedy
was
nearly as bad as the problem.

One solution that did not occur to Allen (and which, admittedly, courts absurdity and takes some getting used to, even today), is the simple expedient of printing all schedules in local time. A train might leave an eastern city at noon, and arrive in a nearby central-zone station
before
noon, as we often do today when flying. Allen’s plan retained the train’s original time standard for as long as possible, all the way to its terminal or point of transfer. Dozens of exceptions were permitted for popular routes. A complicated map accompanied the new reforms.

Dowd and Allen embodied some of the great philosophical divides of the nineteenth century. Allen counted trees; Dowd saw the forest. Allen was a tinkerer, Dowd a synthesizer. Allen’s plan was derived from railroad usage; Dowd’s from passenger convenience. Allen was the pragmatic, politically expedient man of the world, Dowd the dreamer, the impractical professor. In the autodidact world of nineteenth-century American science
and philosophy, deduction (
a priori
thinking) and induction (
a posteriori
thinking) were both acceptable approaches to a problem. And, I might add, Dowd was a New Englander, a child of transcendentalism; Allen was the New American Man.

On Sunday morning, November 18, 1883, railroad standard time (“Vanderbilt time,” sneered its opponents, but it was more accurately Allen time) became a reality across North America. That Sunday came to be known as “the Sunday of Two Noons,” since towns along the eastern edges of the four new American “time belts” had to turn their clocks back half an hour, creating a second noon, in order to conform to towns along the western edges of the same belt. No one in the country would “gain” or “lose” more than half an hour of his life. The dominant technology of the age had set the new time standard. Up in Ottawa, Sandford Fleming hailed it as “a quiet revolution.”

Within days, about 70 percent of schools, courts, and local governments had adopted railroad time as their official standard. The federal government, much to Allen’s relief, did not get on the bandwagon. (In fact, Congress did not get around to ratifying standard time until 1918.) For the first time in history, Boston and Buffalo, Washington and New York, Atlanta and Columbus, San Francisco and Spokane, all shared the same hour and minute. It didn’t matter that Boston would be bright with the new day while Wheeling was still dark. In fact, it didn’t matter what the sun proclaimed at all. “Natural time” was dead. Some towns, like Bangor, Maine, and Savannah, Georgia, refused, out of religious faith or plain old stubbornness, to go along. A city like Detroit, perched at the edge of eastern and central times, could not make up its mind, and voted itself, over the course of many years, in and out of both times before settling on its “eastern” designation. For many years people in Detroit would still have to ascertain, in setting appointments, “Is that solar, train, or city time?”

The 1884 Prime Meridian Conference that set standard time for the world followed the Sunday of Two Noons by less than a
year, but the model of standard time with which Allen is associated, that of railroad standardization, played no role. The conference protocols were based on Dowd-like proposals, although Dowd was not named, nor even invited to the conference.

IN
1904, Allen published a small book entitled
Standard Time in North America, 1883–1903
. The first nineteen pages recapitulate his central role in the standard-time movement (with brief and dismissive mentions of Fleming and Dowd), while the final sixty pages are letters solicited by him from his railroad colleagues, conferring upon him undisputed credit for devising and implementing standard time. “Of all living men you are the one entitled to the credit of inaugurating the system of Standard Time,” wrote one. “I never heard of Mr Chas. F. Dowd in connection with our Standard Time; you were the only person known in the matter to me,” affirmed another. Only Mr. E.T.D. Myers, it seems to me, struck a note both just and historic: “Time was in the air.” It was “in the air,” he goes on to say, the way freedom had been in the air a hundred years earlier. Mr. Thomas Jefferson got the credit for
that
little revolution, but (like Allen) he was propelled in his course by the tides of history, and by able assistants.

Most of
this
book is an application of Myers’s modest but far-reaching insight. Time was in the air in every human endeavor. The standardization of time, the overthrow of “natural” time, were necessary preconditions to scientific, technological, and artistic innovation and experimentation, and they all came together in the decade of time.

Allen was on surer ground in claiming that the adoption of standard time had a cascading effect on other forms of standardization, among them track gauges, uniform couplers, safety standards, freight rates, and wage scales. Until standardization, the Baltimore & Ohio, America’s oldest railroad, had employed a seemingly sanctified track gauge of four feet, eight and a half
inches ever since its founding in 1830. Most railroads, with the exception of the Erie, followed the B&O. That width, however, had been the standard separation of stagecoach wheels, a standard that, in turn, commemorated the distance between the centers of stone tracks on Roman roads built to accommodate the axle length of military chariots. And so goes the process of natural thought, unchanged for two thousand years. Thus do Chinese iron plows come to America.

Allen was an engineer, not a philosopher, but his claims are philosophically germane to the larger concerns of this book. Standardization of time was a sophisticated abstraction that actually improved practical commerce, and lent communications “real time” coordination. Standardization of time is part of an ever larger shift of consciousness, toward secular rationalism, and away from “natural” authority. And standardization was not solely a reflection of railroad convenience. In his capacity as America’s chief weather forecaster, Cleveland Abbe received dozens of hourly, data-bearing weather transmissions from dozens of offices, hundreds and even thousands of miles away. In the local-time world of the 1870s and early eighties, he had to translate each of those separate local times of transmission into a single “real time” in order to track the movement of storm fronts and weather patterns. Without standard time, his “probabilities,” as he insisted on calling his forecasts, would have had as much accuracy as the
Old Farmer’s Almanac
.

William Allen, Charles Dowd, and Sandford Fleming are the acknowledged fathers of standard time, but only Fleming spoke to the world. Allen’s role is today celebrated with a gleaming bronze plaque in the remodeled grand concourse of Washington’s Union Station that remembers him as the “devisor and implementer” of standard time for North American railroads. Sir Sandford Fleming boasts a historical marker on a knoll outside the public library in his native Kirkcaldy, Scotland, where he is memorialized as “the inventor of standard time for the world.”
Charles Dowd, the tragic figure among the three, died in a railroad-crossing accident in Saratoga Springs in 1904, and was memorialized with a bronze plaque in the First Presbyterian Church of Saratoga Springs for his role as educator and inventor of standard time. Fire razed the church in 1976. Only a few un-melted fragments of his memorial were saved.

THE SPEECHES
and papers on the Lake Ontario beaches and the formation of Toronto Harbour that Fleming delivered to scant audiences at the Canadian Institute in 1850 are modest examples of the noble tradition of passionate amateurism in the sciences that fairly defined the intellectual climate of the first half of the nineteenth century. Natural science was an intellectual seducer, undertaught and unrewarded, feeding the speculative frontier. Jules Verne’s undersea and lunar adventures were not understood as pure fantasy. They, and Percival Lowell’s “discovery” of the canals on Mars, respected a prevailing popular attitude. Even into late century, many educated people assumed the connectedness of life on the surface of the earth with extraterrestrial civilizations, as well as with undersea and even so-far undiscovered life in temperate, subterrestrial pockets. The idea of a habitable solar system was a Victorian commonplace. (Following the “refutation” of the canals, it has taken another hundred years to restore a similar respectability to the idea of an inhabited universe. It’s the mark of our humanity. Many astronomers today project habitable zones, vast liquid oceans, on Jupiter’s moons.)

Natural science in the era of “natural time,” before the revolutionary period of rationalization that began in the 1850s, attracted the wayward eccentrics, the mathematically gifted or the
profoundly curious, from approved professions like theology, engineering, and medicine. Botany, geology, astronomy, archaeology, mythology, and linguistics were all enriched by a colorful assortment of autodidacts and hobbyists. Even the greatest among them, Charles Darwin, was self-taught, although the thirty years he spent contemplating the results of his youthful voyage to the Galápagos virtually created the condition of modern science, the hinge between the natural and the rational worlds, between amateur and professional science.