Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Time Zones

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, So Tracy.
Humans have understood the passage of time and been able

(00:21):
to calculate the length of a day pretty accurately for
quite a while. Yea longer than we have records, probably, yes,
But there was not a standard way to approach time
on a global scale until pretty late in the game.
For hundreds of years longer than that, even cities or

(00:41):
towns generally had their own local time. That time was
determined by when the sun hit at zenith above them,
and that was established as noon, and the rest of
the hours of the day were determined based on that.
Pretty simple. Each municipality or community had an official timekeeper.
That person was the authority on what time it was.

(01:03):
Any other clocks are watches in that community were set
to match the timekeeper's time. That kept everybody in a
group on the same page. However, though this worked just
fine and for a very long time. As humans began
to industrialize and travel became more swift, thanks largely two railroads,
it became much more important to figure out what time

(01:26):
it was both in the place where your journey started
and the place where it ended, as well as any
stops in between, and that could rapidly get really confusing. So,
just as a very sloppy example, imagine a journey today
where you have a flight with a layover, and if
you left your starting airport and you got to the
layover airport and their time was twenty three minutes off

(01:49):
of what you expected, because often they were not like
round numbers that were different, figuring out your connection could
get really dicey in a hurry. And that kind of
thing was happening to people traveling by rail before a
standard time was established, and it was more than just
an inconvenience because this also led to dangerous conditions and
collisions when trains were running based on different local times

(02:14):
but on the same track. So even the people that
were scheduling trains couldn't quite get it together with one
another to make a system to make it safe for
a while. So today we're going to talk about that problem,
and specifically about the man who is usually credited with
solving the problem by standardizing time zones, and that person

(02:34):
was Sandford Fleming. Sanford Fleming was born January seven, eight seven,
in Kirkcaldy, five Scotland. Parents were Elizabeth Aren't Fleming and
Andrew Greig Fleming. Andrew was a carpenter. The Flemings had
a sizeable family. In addition to Sandford, there were seven
other children. Sanford's early education was in school in Kennaway

(02:57):
and Killcaldy, and then at fourteen he started studying with
an engineer and surveyor named John Sang. This was a
natural fit even as a child, Sandford had shown a
natural skill at drawing and mathematics alike. Yeah, kind of
perfectly intersect into like surveying and architecture work. Saying gave
Fleming a lot of practical, really valuable hands on instruction.

(03:22):
Scotland's railroads were rapidly expanding at this time, and when
Saying was called the survey sites as part of that project,
his student went with him and he assisted. He was
given tasks on site, but Fleming saw a future for
himself outside of Scotland, even though he did enjoy surveying.
After several years under Saying's mentorship, Sandford moved from Scotland

(03:44):
to Canada in eight He did not make this journey alone.
His cousin Henry Fleming and his brother David also moved
to Canada with him. All three young men were hoping
to find employment and new opportunities in North America, and
they were all so hoping that they would be able
to acquire land and become settled enough that the rest

(04:04):
of their family could join them. The Fleming trio sailed
aboard a ship called the Brilliant, and this was not
an easy journey. On May one, which was only a
week into the voyage, Sandford recorded this in his journal quote,
as the evening advanced, the storm grew worse. I never
expected to see daylight again. When a great wave swept

(04:26):
above our heads, it had a sound as if the
sea was closing over us. We slept none all night.
Sandford is said to have been so convinced that they
were all about to die that he put a message
in a bottle and threw it overboard. Has had a
farewell letter to the family in it, and that bottle
did get to Scotland, But it looks like by the

(04:49):
time the family received it, they knew that Sandford, David,
and Henry had all gotten to Canada safely. Yet that
was a long trip though. That was a five week
long trip, so after this we think we're gonna die night.
They still had four more weeks at sea to probably
white knuckle it through the entire journey, and then after

(05:09):
landing in Quebec City, the three young men had another
three weeks of travel ahead of them. They boarded a
steamship to what was at the time called Upper Canada
that would eventually be Ontario, and that was to the
city of Peterborough. They're Fleming found work with a surveyor
named Richard Birdsall. Fleming needed to be certified as a
surveyor in Canada to work on his own, and that

(05:31):
was going to take some money and some time and
some experience, and to help cover his basic expenses, he
took sidework in map making jobs so that he could
bring in extra money. He drew maps of various municipalities,
including Peterborough, Hamilton, Cobourg, and Toronto. And it was also
in Toronto that he moved into a new job working
for a surveyor named John Stouton Dennis. Finally, on April nine,

(05:57):
Fleming got his Canadian Surveyors ortification. Almost immediately after being certified,
Fleming joined with other surveyors they formed the Canadian Institute
in Toronto. This was intended as a professional organization for surveyors,
engineers and architects. The society was founded in June of
eighteen forty nine, but it didn't get the membership and

(06:19):
structure that was needed to be recognized as a professional society.
Fleming was not willing to let the group fall apart,
so he reorganized it as a scientific society and remained
involved with it in the fifteen years that he lived
in Toronto. He also spearheaded the group's production of its periodical,
which was just titled Canadian Journal. Two professional achievements marked

(06:44):
Fleming's life in eighteen fifty one. First, the map of
Toronto that he had worked on with John Stotton Dennis,
which was the last of those map projects that he
had done as sidework, was published, and then he designed
the first Canadian postage stamp. He sometimes credited with making
the beaver like the landmark animal of Canada and their

(07:05):
unofficial mascot at that point. In eighteen fifty two, Sandford
Fleming started working for the Ontario, Simcoe and Huron Union
Railroad as an assistant to Frederick William Cumberland. He had
been one of his collaborators and setting up the Canadian Institute.
They're working relationship, though, was really not good. Fleming became
increasingly irritated with Cumberland, who often took a lot of

(07:28):
side jobs that split his attention off from their railroad work.
Things became so heated between them that Cumberland fired Fleming
in eighteen fifty five, but Fleming felt that his supervisor
had been the one who was in the wrong, and
he went to the railroad's leadership to complain. The result
of this seemed like a win for Fleming. He was

(07:50):
given Cumberland's job, but Cumberland was on the railways board
of directors, and over the next few years the two
of them just kept clashing more and more. Fleming was
ultimately the one who lost in their disputes. Yeah, there
was a particularly contentious argument about pay that he really

(08:11):
really thought Cumberland was responsible for and he did not
win that one, and it really stung. And as that
conflict between Fleming and Cumberland had continued to grow, Fleming
had been allowed to stay with the railroad as an
employee that had become the Northern railway at that point,
but he was also allowed with permission to take side jobs.
This was different for him and that he had gotten

(08:33):
permission to do this, whereas Cumberland was just taking jobs
whenever he wanted, so he saw it as a different situation.
And Fleming had also started his own private firm with
a colleague named Collingwood Schreiber. The two of them designed
the Palace of Industry for Toronto in eighteen fifty eight.
If you look at photos of this particular structure, it

(08:53):
probably looks very familiar because it was based on Joseph
Paxton's Crystal Palace created for London's Great Exhibition of eighteen
fifty one, which we have talked about on the show before.
Fleming continued his railway work for decades. He thought it
was important to expand the railroads, and in particular to
establish a transcontinental railway. Fleming duet plans for various very

(09:17):
ambitious railway projects and lobbied the government both in Canada
and in Britain for funding for these projects. Initially, he
struggled to get approvals, but he was making a name
for himself in the process. When it became really an
obvious and pressing need for a railway to connect Canada's
continental colonies to the maritime colonies. Sanford Fleming was the

(09:40):
obvious choice to everybody to become the chief surveyor for
the project. He was given that job in eighteen sixty three,
and in eighteen sixty seven he was promoted to Engineer
in chief for the Intercolonial Railway. And despite the various conflicts,
he was growing quite successful. And as that success grew,
Fleming wisely invested in real estate that not only expanded

(10:03):
his wealth, but it also made some strategic sense for
his work. He wasn't like buying speculating on real estate.
He was buying basically land for himself in various places.
He had moved to Ottawa in eighteen sixty nine. That
was a move that was pretty necessary because he needed
to be closed to federal government offices for the work
he was doing in In eighteen seventy four, he also

(10:24):
bought a home in Halifax, Nova Scotia, so that when
he traveled there for work on the ongoing Maritimes project,
he would have a home base. And he also, as
had been planned, moved his family over to Canada and
settled them in Halifax. We'll pause here for a quick
sponsor break, and when we come back, we'll talk about
the ways that Sanford Fleming came into conflict with his colleagues, which,

(10:47):
based on the conflict so far, seems a little unsurprising
they would continue. Fleming, who was known to be obstinate
but also often right, continued to butt heads with various

(11:08):
peers in the industry. This seems to have pretty much
always been a case of Fleming being certain that he
knew better than the other party what was genuinely best
for any given project. For example, when commissioners of the
National Railway wanted to use timber for the construction of
bridges as part of the Intercolonial Railway project, Fleming was

(11:29):
adamant that they should be using steel and stone instead,
and he went right up the chain of command in
Ottawa government to make that case. Fleming got his way,
and as a consequence, those structures were far sturdier and
had longer life than was projected had the bridges been
built with timber. This, of course, seems pretty obvious now,

(11:49):
but in the late eighteen sixties the cost difference was
so significant that it was considered a better idea by
a lot of people to use Timber Sandford fleming approach,
which also involves some new engineering techniques that he was pioneering,
resulted in bridges that were strong enough and with enough
longevity that they actually cost less to maintain over the

(12:11):
long term. Even though he was having a proven track record,
the railways kept seeing Fleming as a problem. After he
became the chief engineer on the Pacific Railway. Fleming was
very outspoken about his ideals, and a friend of his,
Reverend George Grant, even published a book detailing the reverence
travels with Fleming as he made his surveys. That book

(12:33):
was the best seller. It's noted as giving a lot
of insight into the railroads and its benefits to the
general public, but the railroad did not appreciate moves like that.
The railroad found Fleming's constant willingness to just share his
views with the public to be a problem. He worked
for the railroad, but he wasn't approved to be a

(12:54):
spokesman for the railroad, and that created issues as his
outspokenness made him the face of the railroads to the public.
He was let go in May of eighteen eighty with
a retirement severance of thirty thousand dollars. This is one
of those things that I think if you've never worked
in a corporate structure, you might be like, why shouldn't he?
But if there are always people, I mean, it would

(13:17):
be like me if I just started shooting my mouth
off about the way like our company runs part of
its business, and they would be like, Holly, that's not
your business, shut up, um, And that would be valid
because it's not my business. Every company I've worked for
has had rules about like what kind of thing you're not,
whether you're allowed to speak on behalf of the company,

(13:37):
and if you are allowed, there's still a bunch of
rules about it. He may have been the expert, but
he was a stracy just said, not designated as a spokesman.
So for him to just go blab stuff all the
time was really problematic. But just four years after this devastating,
essentially firing, they framed in as a retirement and he
got severance, but he had really been fired of Four

(14:00):
years later, Fleming, who had actually continued to have a
stake in the Canadian Pacific Railway, became director of the
Canadian Pacific Railway. He had purchased shares in the Hudson's
Bay Company. That company had transferred massive land holdings to
the Canadian government in the eighteen seventies. The Canadian Pacific
Railway Company was incorporated in eighteen eighty one by Act

(14:23):
of Parliament, and so he was connected to all of
this by virtue of having had those shares. Fleming had
served in a role as resident Canadian director with Hudson's Bay,
and he applied for the Canadian Pacific Railway director position
in eighty three and got it. So, if you're thinking
I thought this episode was about time zones, why have

(14:44):
we been talking about railroads this whole time, it's because
the railroad work is directly tied to the establishment of
standardized time. As a career railroad man who traveled a lot,
Fleming had a deep appreciation for how tricky and can
using it could be to reconcile the local time and
whatever place that was he were traveling. And when it

(15:06):
came to running an entire unified transportation system had to
go in and out of a variety of places that
all kept their own local time, this whole task was
a huge headache. You can see where someone building a
railroad would be like wait, but what time is it
where this station is, Well, it's seventeen minutes later than

(15:27):
at the previous station, Holly, oh Okay. Even before he
had been let go from the railroad in eighteen eighty,
Fleming was taking on new roles outside of the industry.
In eighteen seventy nine, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario asked
him to become chancellor. That kind of made him the
spokesperson for science and professional education for the school. He

(15:49):
was really active in that position for the rest of
his life and helped to establish the School of Mining
and Agriculture there, and he lobbied for financial support for
the university science programs. Also in eighteen seventy nine, Daniel
Wilson reinstated Fleming at the Canadian Institute. Wilson, like Fleming,
thought there should be standardized time. Because Fleming was already

(16:12):
seen as a scientific authority by both the public and
by a lot of his peers. All of these developments
coming at the same time really made the late eighteen
seventies the right moment for Fleming to make a case
for a standardized time around the world. There were two
different and separately prepared reports that were published in eighteen

(16:32):
seventy nine about the problem of their not being a
standardized time. One of those was written by Fleming, the
other was written by chief of the United States Weather Service,
Cleveland Abbey. Fleming read his report in front of the
Canadian Institute, and then it went to the Governor General
and then up to the Colonial Office. Throughout its movement

(16:54):
and its distribution, the reception to this paper was extremely good.
Everyone agreed that something needed to be done to get
people on one unified system. Abby was also getting positive
reactions to his paper, which he first presented to the
American Meteorological Society. His impetus for writing this report was
a series of observations on the Northern Lights, and because

(17:17):
of a lack of an agreed upon meantime, reports from
different places were almost impossible to reconcile to compile actual data.
While Fleming wanted to help the train industry, Abby wanted
to create a stronger guideline for time based science reporting.
But once Abby and Fleming realized that each of them

(17:39):
had written on this subject and had also used very
similar ideas about how to accomplish a global system of time,
they didn't do what you might expect if you've listened
to previous episodes featuring scholars who have similar ideals, and honestly,
if you've listened to the earlier part of this episode
about how uh kind of argumentative that Fleming could be.

(18:02):
They did not have a fight about it. They joined forces.
The two men had a lot of connections throughout North
America and Europe. They had these connections in both government
and the scientific communities. They knew if they widened those
connections and if they lobbied for the adoption of time
standards as a team, they could have a really wide

(18:22):
net of influence. Yeah, it was like, you have a
whole group of people that you con curry favor with.
I also have a different group of people. What if
we put these all together? How big will our influence be? Now?
Just to be clear, these papers that came out that
same year did not just spring up out of the blue.
Both of these men and others had been working on

(18:43):
this idea and writing about it for some time before
eighteen seventy nine. Usually people will point to eighteen seventy six,
when Fleming had published a paper called Terrest Real Time,
which opened with quote, the question to which I proposed
to direct attention is not purely English in its interest,
or indeed limited to any particular country or continent. It

(19:04):
is a question which concerns all nations in common, and
it is probably of less importance to the inhabitants of
the British Isles than to colonists and those who live
in continental countries. It went on to say, quote, within
a comparatively recent period, the human race has acquired control
over a power which already has in a remarkable degree

(19:25):
changed the condition of human affairs. The application of steam
to locomotion by land and water has given an enormous
stimulus to progress throughout the world, and with the electric
telegraph as an auxiliary, has somewhat rudely shaken customs and
habits which have been handed down to us from bygone centuries.

(19:46):
We still cling, however, to the system of chronometry inherited
from a remote antiquity, notwithstanding difficulties and inconveniences which are
constantly met in every part of the world, but which
are so familiar to us that they are not regarded
or are silently endured. It's a very long winded way
to say you don't have to miss your trains all

(20:07):
the time. We can miss this. We don't have to
keep doing it this way just because the way we've
the way we've done it for so long. Yeah. Fleming's
work on this subject was more extensive than Abby's, which
is why he is largely credited with the idea of
creating and championing standard time. He was also, as we
have said, very outspoken, so his name became the one

(20:28):
more recognized as the leader of the effort to get
a time system adopted. Both of them basically had this
idea to set up twenty four time zones around the
world to match the number of hours in a day,
and to divide the circumference of the equator by twenty
four to establish those zones. Fleming had given an example
of the issues of local timekeeping for travelers in his

(20:52):
eighteen seventy six paper, one that seems taken from his
own life experience and his intimate knowledge of train travel. Quote.
To illustrate the points of difficulty, let us first take
the case of a traveler in North America. He lands,
let us say, at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and starts on
a railway journey through the eastern portions of Canada. His

(21:13):
route is over the Intercolonial and Grand Trunk Lines. He
stops at St. John, Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto. At
the beginning of the journey, he sets his watch by
Halifax time. As he reaches each place in succession, he
finds a considerable variation in the clocks by which the
trains are run, and he discovers that at no two

(21:34):
places is the same time used. Between Halifax and Toronto.
He finds the railways employing no less than five different
standards of time. If the traveler remained at any one
of these cities referred to, he would be obliged to
alter his watch in order to avoid much inconvenience and
perhaps not a few disappointments and annoyances to himself and others. If, however,

(21:58):
he should not alter his watch, he would discover on
reaching Toronto, but it was an hour in five minutes,
faster than the clocks and watches in that city. You
can see why this would be a big pain in
the neck. We're going to talk about how all of
this discussion about time finally turned into action in just
a moment. But first we will hear from the sponsors

(22:20):
that keep stuff you missed in history class going. Fleming's
greatest asset in his work to standardize time was the
American Society of Civil Engineers. Because so many of their
members worked for various North American railroads, they all had

(22:43):
a vested interest in fixing this problem. The society instituted
a standing committee on time in one and Fleming was
named as its chairman. He used this position to gather
data from railroad workers and scientists, paying the research expenses
for all of this out of his own pocket, and
he found out pretty quickly that just about everyone in

(23:04):
the railroad industry was in favor of his system. So
though he was planning to take his findings to the
US Congress for action, the North American railways acted independently
before that could even happen, and cooperatively adopted his plan
for one hour time zones on November three. So keep
in mind that before this there were a hundred and

(23:26):
forty four different localized times being used in the United
States alone, so no wonder an entire industry that was
trying to link all these places together was in favor
of the plan. Simplified things for them considerably, yes, and
after the trains adopted it, most of North America kind

(23:47):
of followed suit, but even so there wasn't anything official
in place at a government level, and other continents and
countries were still kind of doing their own thing. But
the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Meteorological Society
were very vocal about the need for a wider adoption
of this system, and members of those groups reached out

(24:08):
to their contacts in Congress to push for action. President
Chester A. Arthur also requested that some plan for a
wider adoption be explored, and at the same time, the
papers by both Fleming and Abbey were still being circulated
to various other countries and support continued to grow. The
results of this was that in October of eighteen eighty four,

(24:30):
the International Meridian Conference was held in Washington, d C.
This conference was called entirely with the goal of choosing
one single global prime meridian is the position of zero
degrees longitude, and that would be the base for all
the other calculations. Twenty six nations participated in this Austria, Hungary, Brazil, Chile, Columbia,

(24:53):
Costa Rica, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Guatemala, Hawaii, Italy, Japan, Liberia, Mexico, Netherlands, Paraguay, Russia,
San Domingo, Salvador, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United States,
and Venezuela. Sometimes you'll see this reported as twenty two countries,

(25:15):
because a lot of folks weren't there yet on the
first day. I'm just gonna, in my head canon be
it's because the time zones didn't exist and they had
missed their connections. Admiral CRP. Rogers, who was one of
the US delegates, was named President of the conference, and
in his opening speech, Roger stated that quote in my

(25:36):
own profession that of a seaman. The embarrassment arising from
the many prime meridians now in use is very conspicuous,
and in the valuable interchange of longitudes by passing ships
at see, often difficult and hurried, sometimes only possible by
figures written on a blackboard, much confusion arises, and at

(25:56):
times grave danger. In the use of charts to this
trouble is also annoying, and to us who live upon
the sea, a common prime meridian will be a great advantage.
I need not trespass further upon your attention, except to
lay before you the subject we are invited to discuss
the choice of a meridian to be employed as a

(26:17):
common zero of longitude and standard of time reckoning throughout
the world. The meridian that passed through the Royal Observatory
in Greenwich, England had been in use by a lot
of mariners and railroads for some time as the mean
from which all distance and time was calculated. It was
not a universally accepted prime meridian before this conference, Maps

(26:40):
that were created in different countries would often put the
zero longitude line through the capital of whatever country the
map was made in. This kind of reminds me of
our Gertis Mercatur episode talking about different places putting their
north north not necessarily being up. It's got some similarities
to that, and that is made calculating navigational roots and difficult.

(27:04):
But it wasn't about time and selecting a prime meridian
that would be agreed on internationally. The hope was that
a universal time what eventually became known as Coordinated Universal
Time or UTC, would be established. The minutes to this
entire conference are readable online. There's a link to them
at their Project Guttenberg location. In our show notes and

(27:26):
a lot of it is pretty dry parliamentary procedure. But
Pierre Jensen, one of the French delegates and also the
director of the Physical Observatory of Paris, made the case
that a prior gathering in Rome had seemed to only
consider the geographical aspect of the meridian question and not
the hydrographic needs of the world. He made an impassioned

(27:48):
and lengthy speech in which he stated, quote, nearly all
the astronomical tables used at the present time by the
astronomers and the navies of the world are French and
calculated for the Paris meridian. This is also a little
bit related to our episode on the discovery of longitude,
which you can check out for a kind of a
companion piece to this. It also reminds me of the

(28:11):
Esperanto episode when there were conferences about what if we
adopted Esperanto as an international language, and France was like,
but France is already the international language, or French is
already the international language. Yes. Anyway, Jason went on to
make it clear that he felt that France had always
been brushed aside and considerations, and that he clearly saw

(28:31):
the adoption of Greenwich as the international prime meridian as
an unfair advantage to England that would just lead to
future conflict. Arguing quote, I now hastened to say that
I am persuaded that the proposition voted for at Rome
was neither made nor suggested by England. But I doubt
whether it would render a true service to the English

(28:53):
nation if it be agreed to. An immense majority of
the navies of the world navigate with English charts. That
is true, and it is a practical complement to the
great maritime activity of that nation. When this freely admitted
supremacy shall be transformed into an official and compulsory supremacy,
it will suffer the vicissitudes of all human power, and

(29:16):
that institution, the common Meridian, which by its nature is
of a purely scientific nature, and to which we would
assure a long and certain future, will become the object
of burning competition and jealousy among nations. It's an interesting thought.
It will make England too important, and we will all

(29:38):
quite about this forever. And this is also like it
just came up in the Mercator episode also about like
this map that's a standard puts Europe in the middle.
It's the same kind of thought process about like the
eurocentric city and in this case like the Britain specifics
and eccentricity of all of it. Now, the French delegation
did propose a resolution that would avoid this problem. That

(30:00):
resolution read quote that the initial meridians should have a
character of absolute neutrality. It should be chosen exclusively so
as to secure to science and to international commerce all
possible advantages, and especially should cut no great continent, neither
Europe nor America. That resolution got only three votes of

(30:22):
support from France, Brazil and San Domingo. It did not pass,
but the conference did pass seven other resolutions, which read
as follows. One that it is the opinion of this
Congress that it is desirable to adopt a single prime
meridian for all nations in place of the multiplicity of
initial meridians which now exists too. That the Conference proposes

(30:46):
to the government's here represented, the adoption of the meridian
passing through the center of the transit instrument at the
Observatory of Greenwich as the initial meridian for longitude three.
That from this meridian, longitude shall be counted in two
directions up to one eighty degrees east longitude being plus
and west longitude minus four that the Conference proposes the

(31:10):
adoption of a universal day for all purposes for which
it may be found convenient, and which shall not interfere
with the use of local or other standard time. We're desirable.
Five that this universal day is to be a mean
solar day. It is to begin for all the world
at the moment of mean midnight of the initial meridian,

(31:31):
coinciding with the beginning of the civil day and date
of that meridian, and is to be counted from zero
up to twenty four hours. Six. That the Conference expresses
the hope that, as soon as maybe practicable, the astronomical
and nautical days will be arranged everywhere to begin at
mean midnight. Seven That the Conference expresses the hope that

(31:53):
the technical studies designed to regulate and extend the application
of the decimal system to the division of angular space
and of time shall be resumed so as to permit
the extension of this application to all cases in which
it presents real advantages. So as you read that, you
may have surmised that though the Conference established the prime meridian,

(32:14):
it did not dictate its adoption in any real way.
Each country could enact the system, however, and whenever it wished.
In the sixteen years between the conference and the dawn
of the twentieth century, most countries had officially adopted or
officially transition to the resolutions agreed to by the International
Meridian Conference, and that was still a very at your

(32:38):
own pace approach, with some countries keeping their own time
for a while or observing the standardization but not in
any official way. Although the US had adopted it pretty
completely by for instance, it wasn't actually cautified or mandatory
until nineteen eighteen. Countries also weren't bound to adhere to
the twenty four hour fifteen degrees of longitude plan where

(33:01):
it didn't make sense. And if you look at a
time zone map today, you'll see plenty of places where
the time zone lines shift to follow the boundaries of
different countries or states, or so that the line runs
along a river, just to make things a little simpler
in day to day life, and because you're probably wondering
if you don't already know, some places use half hour

(33:22):
time zones where it makes sense, and because the polls
are where the lines of longitude all converge, they use
the same coordinated universal time as Greenwich. Those time zone
lines have shifted over the years as well. I think
the most recent change was in so pretty recently. For example,
Georgia was initially split by a time zone line when

(33:43):
standardization was adopted. So very roughly speaking, if you know
the state of Georgia, the western third of the state
was in the Central time zone while the rest was
in the Eastern time zone. And it actually wasn't until
one that the State of Georgia was entirely moved into
the Eastern time zone. Now for US folks, on March
nineteenth eighteen, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Standard Time Act,

(34:07):
making it law in the US. The Eastern, Central Mountain, Pacific,
and Alaskan time zones were all established at that time.
Those time zones are still the ones that we use.
Although at that point time zones fell under the jurisdiction
of the Interstate Commerce Commission. That work was shifted over
to the Department of Transportation when it was founded in

(34:29):
nineteen sixties six. There has been a lot of discussion
recently about daylight savings time. There are other countries that
do some shifting, but we're focusing on the U S
since this has been a big issue lately. It was
established in the US through that Standard Time Act. The
idea was that if we shifted time around so that

(34:50):
people were awake and active during most of the hours
where there would be sunlight, less energy would be used.
This was initially a World War One money saving measure
that was new in terms of legislation, but it wasn't
a new idea. Benjamin Franklin had pitched a similar idea
in France as a way to save candles. Sometimes people
credit him with inventing daylight savings time. That's not quite correct.

(35:13):
His version was more about shifting your personal schedule, not
changing the time by an hour. She's basically like just
just say you wake up at ten instead of nine,
or like he just wanted to change it. An entomologists
from New Zealand named George Hudson had actually suggested a
clock change to conserve daylight hours back in though after

(35:34):
the war, daylight saving time went away until World War Two,
when it was once again implemented. It was repealed again
in It wasn't until the passing of the Uniform Time
Act in nineteen sixty six that Congress made a national
standard time, including the observance of daylight saving time. Although
Hawaii and Arizona both opted out of daylight Saving time,

(35:58):
with the exception of the navajun aation in the northeast
of what's now Arizona. The Uniform Time Act also set
daylight Saving time as a permanent annual shift, starting the
last Sunday in April and ending the last Sunday in October.
Of course, those dates have changed over the years. In March,
the U. S. Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act. This

(36:21):
wasn't an official vote, it was a verbal They all
were like yes, and then there are some question marks
if they understood it. Yeah, it's a thing called unanimous consent.
And apparently afterwards some senators who were interviewed were like,
I don't know what just happens. Right, This Sunshine Protection
Act would is intended to make Daylight Savings Time permanent.

(36:41):
It still needs to pass in the House of Representatives
and it would then need to be signed into law
by the President. This has certainly sent a lot of
people into a frenzy because the bill has supporters and
attractors on both sides of the political aisle, and if
you are on social media at all, you have seen
people very upset about it. In both directions, probably because
we're recording this. The House will vote and all of

(37:03):
these things will be handled before we published, because how
stuff works. As for Sanford Fleming, he was one of
the charter members of the Royal Society of Canada when
it was established in eighteen eighty two, and he served
as the organization's president in eight eight. He was given
honorary doctorates from several schools and was knighted in eighteen

(37:24):
nine seven. He died in Halifax in nineteen fifteen was
buried in Ottawa. So yes, he barely did not live
long enough to see the United States enact They're standardized
time officially, although he saw it adopted pretty much everywhere
in his lifetime. He also, I should say, as much
as he sounds like a pill, he did die in

(37:45):
the home of his daughter. He was surrounded by his
loved ones. He was very adored by his family. So
I think he was professionally, very stalwart in his beliefs.
But he sounded like he was not a horrible man.
I want to make that clear well. And as a
person who can be very stubborn, especially if I think
I'm right about something, I kind of get it. I

(38:05):
have for listener mail a very very very late thank you,
because yes, most everyone knows we've been staying home for
this whole pandemic um. Our office is currently changing places.

(38:27):
We are moving through different digs, which means that all
of the stuff that goes to stuff you missed in
history class goes to my desk. And last Tuesday, thirty
two boxes arrived by courier on my front porch that
the office manager had sent to my home. Oh my

(38:47):
goodness of largely like books from publishers, but also a
lot of gems among them. And one of those gems
was a gift sent to us by our listener, Tom,
who writes ms Fry, because he knew it was coming
to to me essentially at the office. I hope this
finds you and yours well. A greeting which takes on
new meeting in today's world. Some time ago I mentioned

(39:11):
the enclosed waffle maker to you on Twitter. You seemed
delighted on the concept but dubious about the cost. After
receiving mine and it languishing for months, I realized I
would be unlikely to ever use it, so I decided
to pass it on to someone who would make use
of it. I hope it brings you some small measure
of the pleasure and entertainment that you and Miss Wilson

(39:32):
have brought to me over the years. May you and
yours have days filled with joy, nights filled with peace,
and lives filled with love. Sincerely, Tom, which is the
sweetest note of all time. But this waffle maker, which
I remember talking about on Twitter, makes waffles that look
like legos and you can stack them together. Oh that's great.
I love it. It is and it comes with two

(39:53):
little trays that are like your base tray, so you
can put your blocks and Um. When next you find
yourself here in Atlanta, Tracy, we are going to have
waffle feast to the likes of which has never been seen.
So excited. We'll do savory waffles, We'll do sweet waffles.
We'll make waffles with pumpkin. We'll make waffles with apple,
We'll make waffles, I don't know, we make fish waffles.

(40:15):
Whatever we want to do. It's gonna be a waffle party. Um.
Thank you so much, Tom. I uh. It was one
of the things in the midst of opening box after
box of books from publishers, I was like, what is
this magical discovery. He sent that back in January, So
that's an indicator of how often I'm I've been in
the office twice in the last two and a half years.

(40:37):
That's amazing. I know. We have so many listeners who
are so thoughtful and want to send us physical items.
Let that be a lesson to you. I may or
may not see them for a year or more. And
at this moment, like Holly and I are both working
Me pretty much exclusively remotely, Holly mostly too exclusively remotely.

(40:59):
Oren's High. Our office is kind of between spaces at
this moment with this move, So if you look up
our address online, it's probably our old office that will
come up in search results, And so if you send
stuff there, you might never see it and they get
lost forever. And I think we're still kind of working

(41:20):
through what things will look like in the new space,
which to my knowledge, we don't actually have access to yet.
So you're thinking of sending a physical item, just hold
off for a little bit so it doesn't go into
just Mailimbo. Yes, but I'm very excited for waffles. Thank you, Tom.

(41:43):
If you would like to write to us in a
way that is almost guaranteed to get through. You can
do that via email at History podcast at iHeart radio
dot com. You can also, of course find us on
social media as Missed in History pretty much everywhere, and
if you would like to subscribe to the show and
you have not yet, no matter what time zone you're in,
it's super duper easy. You can do that on the
I heart Radio app or anywhere you listen to your

(42:05):
favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Time Zones