79 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



in the United States and Canada that the complication of the numer- 

 ous time-standards then in use on the various railways forced attention 

 to the matter. To Mr. Sandford Fleming, the constructor of the Inter- 

 colonial Railway of Canada and engineer-in-chief of the Pacific Rail- 

 way, belongs the credit of having originated the idea of a universal 

 time to be used all over the world. In 1879 Mr. Fleming set forth his 

 views on time-reckoning in a remarkable paper read before the Cana- 

 dian Institute. In this he proposed the adoption of a universal day, 

 commencing at Greenwich mean noon or at midnight of a place on the 

 anti-meridian of Greenwich i. e., in longitude 180 from Greenwich. 

 The universal day thus proposed would coincide with the Greenwich 

 astronomical day instead of with the Greenwich civil day, which is 

 adopted for general use in this country. 



The American Metrological Society in the following year issued a 

 report recommending that, as a provisional measure, the railways in 

 the United States and Canada should use only five standard times, 

 four, five, six, seven, and eight hours respectively later than Green- 

 wich, a suggestion originally made in 1875 by Professor Benjamin 

 Peirce. This was proposed as an improvement on the then existing state 

 of affairs, when no fewer than seventy-five different local times were in 

 use on the railroads, many of them not differing more than one or two 

 minutes. But the committee regarded this merely as a step toward 

 unification, and they urged that eventually one common standard 

 should be used as railroad and telegraph time throughout the North 

 American Continent, this national standard being the time of the me- 

 ridian six hours west of Greenwich, so that North American time 

 would be exactly six hours later than Greenwich time. 



Thanks to the exertions of Mr. "W. F. Allen, Secretary of the Gen- 

 eral Railway Time Convention, the first great practical step toward 

 the unification of time was taken by the managers of the American 

 railways on November 18, 1883, when the five time-standards above 

 mentioned were adopted. Mr. Allen stated in October, 1884, that 

 these times were already used on ninety-seven and a half per cent of 

 all the miles of railway lines, and that nearly eighty-five per cent of 

 the total number of towns in the United States of over ten thousand 

 inhabitants had adopted them. 



I wish to call particular attention to the breadth of view thus 

 evinced by the managers of the American railways. By adopting a 

 national meridian as the basis of their time-system, they might have 

 rendered impracticable the idea of a universal time to be used by Eu- 

 rope as well as America. But they rose above national jealousies, 

 and decided to have their time-reckoning based on the meridian which 

 was likely to suit the convenience of the greatest number, thus doing 

 their utmost to promote uniformity of time throughout the world by 

 setting an example of the sacrifice of human susceptibilities to general 

 expediency. 



