Hardcover
272 Pages
April 10, 2001
Knopf Canada
0676972527
9780676972528
From the Publisher
This is the biography of an idea, and the remarkable story of the
man who created-and then convinced the world to adopt-a unified
standard for telling time.
Today we take the accurate telling of time across the world for
granted. Yet little more than a hundred years ago, people even in
neighbouring towns lived by different time schedules: noon was
simply whenever the sun happened to be overhead-Toronto time, for
example, was different from Hamilton time some forty miles away.
None of this mattered when people travelled in the slow style that
had been the norm for generations. But then, as Clark Blaise makes
vividly clear, trains arrived-and in the new age of communications
myriad local times became a mind-boggling obstacle, and the
rational ordering of time an urgent priority.
Sandford Fleming, a young emigrant from Scotland, performed the
remarkable task of solving the unfathomable temporal riddle of how
to knit together a world stippled with thousands of local times.
That invention was the start of an exhausting campaign to persuade
the squabbling international powers, the diplomats and scientists,
to adopt a unified time system-a campaign that came to a dramatic
conclusion at the Prime Meridian Conference in 1884. His
achievement turned out to be one of the greatest gifts of the
Victorian Age to our global modern world.
This was the great "Decade of Time," as Blaise calls it, that
extraordinary ten years that also saw the invention of electric
light, the telephone, Impressionism and high-speed cameras.
Time Lord is an absorbing reflection on the mythic origins
of time itself, as well as a meditation on science, psychiatry, art
and literature (from Dickens to Sherlock Holmes to Hemingway); the
roots of depression and anxiety; and the results of one man''s
fascination with clocks and watches and railway schedules. At the
heart of the story is the mild but fierce-minded communications
genius who sketched and surveyed his way from coast to coast,
oversaw the building of the great Canadian railroad, designed the
first Beaver stamp, and invented the world-circling, sub-Pacific
cable; who saw the world as a whole and changed its nature forever.
From the Jacket
This is the biography of an idea, and the remarkable story of the
man who created--and then convinced the world to adopt--a unified
standard for telling time.
Today we take the accurate telling of time across the world for
granted. Yet little more than a hundred years ago, people even in
neighbouring towns lived by different time schedules: noon was
simply whenever the sun happened to be overhead--Toronto time, for
example, was different from Hamilton time some forty miles away.
None of this mattered when people travelled in the slow style that
had been the norm for generations. But then, as Clark Blaise makes
vividly clear, trains arrived--and in the new age of communications
myriad local times became a mind-boggling obstacle, and the
rational ordering of time an urgent priority.
Sandford Fleming, a young emigrant from Scotland, performed the
remarkable task of solving the unfathomable temporal riddle of how
to knit together a world stippled with thousands of local times.
That invention was the start of an exhausting campaign to persuade
the squabbling international powers, the diplomats and scientists,
to adopt a unified time system--a campaign that came to a dramatic
conclusion at the Prime Meridian Conference in 1884. His
achievement turned out to be one of the greatest gifts of the
Victorian Age to our global modern world.
This was the great "Decade of Time," as Blaise calls it, that
extraordinary ten years that also saw the invention of electric
light, the telephone, Impressionism and high-speed cameras. "Time
Lord is an absorbing reflection on the mythic origins of time
itself, as well as a meditation on science, psychiatry, art and
literature (from Dickens toSherlock Holmes to Hemingway); the roots
of depression and anxiety; and the results of one man''s
fascination with clocks and watches and railway schedules. At the
heart of the story is the mild but fierce-minded communications
genius who sketched and surveyed his way from coast to coast,
oversaw the building of the great Canadian railroad, designed the
first Beaver stamp, and invented the world-circling, sub-Pacific
cable; who saw the world as a whole and changed its nature forever.
About the Author
Born to Canadian parents in North Dakota, Clark Blaise grew up with an outsider''s view of America and a romanticized exile''s view of Canada. At age 25 he "returned" to Montreal, claiming this area of the continent as the spiritual home for his writings and becoming a Canadian citizen. Clark Blaise is the author of nine story collections, three novels and three previous works of non-fiction. He currently lives in San Francisco with his wife, Bharati Mukherjee.