Time Lord (3 page)

The irony is inescapable. Ever-finer precision creates ever-widening ambiguity. The nineteenth century’s faith in rationality led supremely confident rationalists in anthropology, sociology, and psychology to study the presumptions behind civilization, or reason itself. Only confident rationalists could explore the irrational, but once they got there, what they discovered undermined the confidence that had got them there in the first place. Enthusiastic evolutionists, as most late-Victorian scientists were, believed they’d been given a key to understanding far more than the origin of species. They saw evolution as applying to history, society, economics, to God, the cosmos, language and logic and the mind itself. Thomas Henry Huxley, the great apostle of Victorian science, believed, in 1887, that applied evolutionary theory would deliver a unified explanation of everything—biology, physics, chemistry, and religion. In 1879, Leslie Stephen, introducing the essays and lectures of his polymathic classmate William Clifford, who had died tragically young of tuberculosis that year, recalled their undergraduate enthusiasm for rationalism in all fields:

Two years after writing this, a formidable presence appeared in Leslie Stephen’s life, his daughter Virginia. She would grow up just as High Victorian certainties were yielding to doubt. Her generation would devote their creative lives to the refutation of nearly all the comforting, steady-state theories of consciousness they’d ingested in their privileged, progressive childhoods. The scientific and material advances that gave leaders of the Victorian establishment, like Leslie Stephen, their faith in reason became a pompous culture of confidence to Edwardian progressives like H. G. Wells, and a target of ridicule for Oscar Wilde. A generation later, Lytton Strachey, D. H. Lawrence, and Leslie Stephen’s daughter Virginia Woolf saw their complacency as a pathology of posturing.

The thing we call time, in other words, is very difficult to dis-entwine from the ways we measure it, from language, social convention, or the internal clock of our DNA. It cannot be described in terms outside of itself. It is, as St. Augustine discovered, a tautology. Many things are like time, but time is only like itself. What can be described, however, is the history of standard time, clock-and-calendar time, the man-made system of time-reckoning. The great achievement of standardization in the nineteenth century, culminating with the Prime Meridian Conference in 1884, was to rationalize “real time” over thousand-mile (or fifteen-degree) zones, and to give it a starting line, Greenwich, agreed to by all. Thanks to standardization, we had the man-made tools to calculate that New York’s four o’clock was simultaneously Chicago’s three o’clock, London’s nine o’clock or Sydney’s … whatever. (At least, we know how to figure it out.)

It is useful, of course, to know what the “real” time is in other
parts of the world when we make telephone calls and run the risk of waking up real people from real sleep, though it hardly matters to e-mailers or stock-traders. Standard time as we’ve inherited it is the final great achievement of Victorian rationality; unreformed, it is vulnerable to the same forces that swept away other golden keys to understanding. (I can’t imagine that twenty or thirty years from now we will still be computing time on a foundation that we’ve inherited, unchanged, from the age of steam.) Adjusting to new time will be like learning a new language, perhaps very much like learning a new language, if we’re hard-wired with space-time coordinates, as Immanuel Kant originally proposed, or as some modern followers of Noam Chomsky might endorse.

TIME HAS
only one visible analogue, and that is space. For Fleming, leader of the standard-time movement in the late nineteenth century and a trained surveyor, time and longitude were interchangeable. He even devised elaborate new watch-faces to prove his point. A glance at the outer wheel of longitudinal letters would give the time, and the inner wheel of clock numbers would disclose the longitude.

In 1860, when he was then a thirty-three-year-old surveyor and civil engineer, the University of Toronto selected him as external examiner for the first-year course in Surveying and Geodesy. John Sang would have been proud. The test he set bears a close resemblance to his own apprenticeship as a teenager in Scotland:

1. Give a general description of a theodolite, its construction, and the uses of its essential parts.
   
2. What is understood by the
   line of collimation
   , and how is the
   error of collimation
   detected and corrected?
   
3. Describe the construction and uses of an
   optical square
   .
   
4. Describe generally one or more methods of conducting a trigonometrical
   survey and protracting the same, also the instruments employed in the field and office.
   
5. Explain the principle of the vernier.
   
6. State how the latitude of a place is ascertained.
   
7. What is understood by
   magnetic variation
   , as well as by the changes in the variation?
   
8. Give a description of one or more methods by which a true meridian may be determined, pointing out the comparative advantages of each method in practice.
   
9. Point out how the longitude is formed.
   
10. From the following bearings and distances, protract the figure, prove the accuracy of the bearings, correct the error, if any, and find the approximate area: [a six-sided figure was given].
    
11. A solid has two parallel ends 128 feet apart; the area of one end is 450 square feet; that of the other 270 square feet; find the number of cubic yards it contains by the prismoidal formula, and by any other method.
    

In many ways, Fleming’s surveying test of 1860, conceived to judge ability in the measurement of space, applies equally well to time. A vernier (named for its French inventor), incidentally, is a kind of gauge, analogous to the second hand on a watch, that can be attached to a larger measuring instrument in order to provide an instant readout of more precise divisions of distance. The theodolite, then as now, is the basic instrument of surveying and civil engineering. Mounted on a tripod and precisely leveled, it measures vertical and horizontal angles. When the “lines of collimation” are connected, uneven surfaces are converted into a precisely rendered grid. In 1860, determining one’s precise geographical location was a thoroughly rational profession. Temporal positioning, by contrast, was still arrived at by solar approximation. Before the decade had ended, in 1869, the first tentative proposal for linking time and longitude—that is, for rationalizing the dimensions of time and space—would be launched.

The surveyors’ instruments have their great and small applications, from establishing the earth’s longitudes and building railways, to determining property lines. They have analogies to timekeeping. Verniers and theodolites date from the sixteenth century, and both were in Fleming’s trunk carried from Scotland. When John Sang and his sons were forced to sell their instruments in a bankruptcy proceeding, they were giving up the tools of their identity.

ON THE
quantum level, as we now say, 140 years later, time and space are indistinguishable, as they are in relativity, as they presumably were before the big bang, and as they are over the “event horizon” of the black hole. Time and space are, in some ways, identities; they can be expressed in mutual terms—“a day’s ride,” “a ten-minute walk.” A student of mine in Montreal, fluent in English but foreign to some of its idioms, once listened to a weather forecast of “five quick inches” of snow on an English-language radio station and asked, panicked, “How big is a ‘quick inch’?” Space, like time, has been measured civilly, legally, astronomically, and politically.

The meter, which is one ten-millionth of a quarter-arc of the earth from equator to pole as measured by the French two centuries ago, and offered to the world as the objective standard for all measurement, can be alternatively defined as the distance light travels in .000000003335640952 of a second. But the fact remains: we have measured time with extraordinary precision, and we still haven’t seen it and can’t say what it is. And of course, the meter is not “objective” at all; it’s merely French. The Germans measured the same quarter-arc in the 1880s and came up with a different figure, a German meter. Today’s measurements by laser from orbit revise it further: an American meter. We are post-Heisenberg; we know that we can’t escape our subjectivity. We’re postmodern; we can’t ignore our cultural bias.

We know that time and space are being “created” (like our
lives, like the expanding universe, like the future) and that those times and places will be rich and deep—but that we’ll never see them. It is an insult to our intellectual vanity, our Faulknerian and Keatsian and Trekkie souls that we’ll never leap ahead to the future we imagine, nor ever walk the streets of an historic Else-when. We yearn to. The dream of stopping time and shrinking space is a marker of our humanity. Our dream is of universal, eternal, and instant communication. Our minds soar with instant connection, but our feet are stuck in temporal boots. At the outer rim of our soaring ambition, we are still confined by time, the unbreakable barrier of the speed of light, which is another way of saying the speed of time. Some day perhaps we’ll make those journeys by virtual reality.

OF ALL
the inventions of the Industrial Age, standard time has endured, virtually unchanged, the longest. We can say where and when standard time for the world started: Bandoran, Ireland, in June 1876. We can say who created it: Sandford Fleming. And why? He missed a train. His fault? No, a misprint. Why a misprint? Because, unthinkingly, we double-count the hours of the day and
A.M
.
can be printed as
P.M
.
and we’re too lazy to count above twelve. That moment of frustration in 1876 became an infinitesimal pinhole through which history and culture were projected.

Arguably, standard time has exercised the deepest influence on everything to come afterwards. The various manifestations of world standard time—the Greenwich prime meridian, the international date line, the unification of the various professional “days,” the twenty-four-hour clock, the counting of longitudes west and east from Greenwich, the definition of the “universal day,” and, by implication, the most important of all, the twenty-four time zones—all came into existence by diplomatic and scientific agreement at the close of the Prime Meridian Conference
held in Washington, D.C., October 1–22, 1884. The conference was officially called by President Chester A. Arthur and opened by his redoubtable secretary of state, Frederick Frelinghuysen, but the force behind it, its orchestrator, was Sandford Fleming.

The standard biographies of Chester Alan Arthur, deservedly one of America’s least celebrated presidents, do not even mention the single great achievement of his term, his role as the host and organizer of the Prime Meridian Conference. It is one of the smaller ironies of American history that a sweeping, international event like the settling of the prime meridian and the protocols of world standard time, which brought a distinguished gathering of leading astronomers and diplomats from the world’s twenty-six independent countries to take part in one of America’s earliest assertions of diplomatic influence on the world stage, should have occurred on Arthur’s otherwise mendacious watch. A month after the Meridian Conference, as related in Adam Hochschild’s
King Leopold’s Ghost
, his friends were conniving with the agents of the imperial powers carving up, all too literally, the African continent.

In one way, however, Chester Arthur was perfectly placed by history to understand the issues of standard time. He worked well with entrenched power, particularly the railroad establishment, and was disinclined to challenge it. Prior to his assuming high national office, the spoils system had installed him as customs chief of New York Harbor. The same Republican-party machinery placed him on the 1880 ticket with James Garfield. The presidency was then handed to him by an assassin’s bullet. With his gracious manners, charm, honorable Civil War and antislavery record, his basic decency—and those impressive ax-blade muttonchops—he embodied the plush, don’t-rock-the-boat certainties of the Gilded Age. He knew railroads, counting many a rail baron among his friends and patrons, and loved to travel in luxury accommodations. It could be said with a certain
degree of admiration that he was one of the least ambitious men ever to hold the office. Yet if any American president, apart from polymaths like Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, or perhaps Jimmy Carter, understood the value of standardization in weights and measures and the role of railroads in forcing change, it might well have been Chester Alan Arthur.

THE WIDER
, extended narrative of standard time started before that day in Bandoran, Ireland, in 1876, and did not end in the Washington conference in 1884. It did not even start with the involvement of Sandford Fleming. Fleming was the catalyst, the man with a vision at the tipping point, when conventional responses to a growing problem were no longer sustainable.

Standard time culminated the long march of reason that had begun with the Renaissance. It coincided with the harnessing of a power source that transcended the mechanical limits of human and animal muscle. Perhaps the first great technological advance leading to the Industrial Age began with nothing grander than a teakettle and a curious, anonymous child who observed its top rattling and lifting under the build-up of steam. If so little water so inefficiently channeled could do
that
, what might more steam, aimed and tightly directed, do? What others saw as a noisy irritation, someone saw as a cheap, easily imitated power-source. Perhaps he grew up to be Giovanni Branca, who in 1628 created a crude steam turbine. Or perhaps he had the misfortune to have been born in France as Solomon of Caus and be confined to an asylum by Cardinal Richelieu for theorizing that the power of steam could out-perform man and beast. In the 1690s steam was powering Thomas Savery’s inefficient vacuum “fountain” pump, but a decade later Thomas Newcomen’s refinement of
the same design was pumping water out of England’s deepest mineshafts.