Sir Sandford Fleming

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Sir Sandford Fleming

Canadian engineer and scientist

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Born:: Jan. 7, 1827, Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scot.

Died:: July 22, 1915, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Can. (aged 88)

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Sir Sandford Fleming (born Jan. 7, 1827, Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scot.—died July 22, 1915, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Can.) was a civil engineer and scientist who was the foremost railway engineer of Canada in the 19th century.

Fleming emigrated in 1845 from Scotland to Canada, where he was trained as an engineer. By 1857 he had become chief engineer for the Ontario, Simcoe, and Huron Railway (now part of the Canadian National Railway). In 1863 he was chosen by the Canadian government to conduct a survey for the route of the first link—from Quebec City to Halifax—of a proposed railway to run from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He became chief engineer for the construction of the resulting Intercolonial Railway (also part of the Canadian National Railway). In 1871 he became engineer-in-chief of the proposed Canadian Pacific Railway, and the routes he surveyed through the Kicking Horse and other passes greatly aided Canadian railway construction in the ensuing decades. Fleming retired from his post with the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1880.

After his retirement Fleming served as chancellor (1880–1915) of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., and devoted himself to scientific projects and writing. Railway travel across great distances in Canada and the United States had rendered obsolete the old practice wherein different regions set their clocks according to local astronomical conditions. In studying solutions to this problem, Fleming advocated the adoption of a standard, or mean, time with hourly variations from it according to a system of time zones. His efforts were instrumental in the convening (1884) of the International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., at which the current internationally accepted system of standard time zones was adopted. Fleming was also a forceful advocate of a telegraph communication system for the British Empire, the first link of which was a Pacific cable between Canada and Australia (1902). Additionally, Fleming designed Canada’s first postage stamp, the threepenny beaver (1851). He was knighted in 1897.

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Standard Time

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Standard Time

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Standard Time, the time of a region or country that is established by law or general usage as civil time.

The concept was adopted in the late 19th century in an attempt to end the confusion that was caused by each community’s use of its own solar time. Some such standard became increasingly necessary with the development of rapid railway transportation and the consequent confusion of schedules that used scores of different local times kept in separate communities. (Local time varies continuously with change in longitude.) The need for a standard time was felt most particularly in the United States and Canada, where long-distance railway routes passed through places that differed by several hours in local time. Sir Sandford Fleming, a Canadian railway planner and engineer, outlined a plan for worldwide standard time in the late 1870s. Following this initiative, in 1884 delegates from 27 countries met in Washington, D.C., and agreed on a system basically the same as that now in use.

The present system employs 24 standard meridians of longitude (lines running from the North Pole to the South Pole, at right angles to the Equator) 15° apart, starting with the prime meridian through Greenwich, England. These meridians are theoretically the centres of 24 Standard Time zones, although in practice the zones often are subdivided or altered in shape for the convenience of inhabitants; a notable example of such alteration is the eastward extension of the International Date Line around the Pacific island country of Kiribati. Time is the same throughout each zone and differs from the international basis of legal and scientific time, Coordinated Universal Time, by an integral number of hours; minutes and seconds are the same. In a few regions, however, the legal time kept is not that of one of the 24 Standard Time zones, because half-hour or quarter-hour differences are in effect there. In addition, Daylight Saving Time is a common system by which time is advanced one hour from Standard Time, typically to extend daylight hours during conventional waking time and in most cases for part of the year (usually in summer).

Time zone map with standard time zones and International Date Line