390 Mr. W. H. M. Christie [March 19, 



States and Russia, tlie time-question was not so easily settled. It was 

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

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

 tion to the matter. To Mr. Sandford Fleming, the constructor of the 

 Inter-Colonial Eailway of Canada and engineer-in-chief of the Pacific 

 Railway, 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 

 Canadian Institute. In this he proposed the adoj)tion 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 Green- 

 wich. 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, 

 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 hours respectively later than Greenwich, a suggestion 

 originally made in 1875 by Prof. Benjamin Pierce. This was pro- 

 posed as an improvement on the then existing state of aflfairs, when 

 no fewer than seventy-five different local times were in use on the 

 railroads, many of them not differing more than 1 or 2 minutes. But 

 the committee regarded this merely as a step towards 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 meridian 6 hours west of 

 Greenwich, so that North American time would be exactly 6 hours 

 later than Greenwich time. 



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

 General Eailw^ay Time Convention, the first great practical step 

 towards 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 97 J per cent, of 

 all the miles of railway lines, and that nearly 85 per cent, of the total 

 number of towns in the United States of over 10,000 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 imj^racticable the idea of a universal time to be used by 

 Europe 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 suscej^tibilities to general 

 expediency. 



Meanwhile Mr. Sandford Fleming's proposal had been discussed 



