FTV: Time Lord
When Canadian actor James Doohan auditioned for the original Star Trek TV series, he was already a gifted mimic when it came to accents. He tried several different ones during his Star Trek audition. The show runners liked the Scotch accent he used the best. Doohan recalled in a 1991 interview that when he was stationed in Yorkshire, England during the Second World War, he served alongside a soldier who had such a thick Scottish burr, “I couldn’t understand a word he said for the first week we were together, but I loved listening to him talk.” The Scotty character Doohan went on to play in numerous Star Trek episodes and films was described as ‘an Aberdeen pub crawler’. He said that his Scotty character’s utterances were indeed based on the Scottish Doric accent prevalent to that area of Scotland. Some criticized it as ‘not being authentic’ but in the same interview, he recounted meeting a group of Scotts backstage after he had performed in a play in San Francisco. He had played a very English barrister in the play but his visitors said, “Yee god, man, we thought you were really a Scotch.”
There was more to it than just the accent that made them mold the Montgomery Scott (‘Scotty’) character as a Scot. In the book Time Lord – Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time (Pantheon Books, 2000), author Clark Blaise points out that having the Chief Engineer on a starship be of Scottish heritage was also a tip of the hat to the numerous, “Steamfitters, boilermakers, gauge-readers, and engineers of the world,” who hailed from those shores. Fittingly, Blaise goes on to list more than a few who happened to emigrate (not just immigrate) to Canada before gaining world-wide fame for some of their accomplishments (like Alexander Graham Bell and Andrew Cundard). Even Doohan’s own father had invented and perfected the process of creating high-octane gas in the western province of British Columbia back in the 1920s. Doohan had just a pedigree (to create the character of Mr. Scott) that was as authentic as his accent.
Before we get to the heart of this FTV, there are two more things we should note about The Enterprise’s Chief Engineer and his accent. When Simon Pegg took on the role in the JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot, the English actor did base his accent on the Scotch members of his family tree. He toned it down some at Abrams’ request to help keep the dialog clear, but he still worked in many ‘Scotty-isms’ created earlier by Doohan. In one of the most recent spinoffs (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) the actor playing the part (Martin Quinn) is a genuine Scottish actor and thus can not be accused of not using a convincing accent. I digressed a bit here, so let us get back to the story of another Scottish tinkerer of many talents, Sir Sandford Flemming.
Sandford Flemming was born in 1827 in the manufacturing town of Kirkcaldy, the son of a local contractor. Kirkcaldy was located on the north shore of the Firth of Forth across the water from Edinburgh. He attended six years of schooling before beginning an apprenticeship with a local land surveyor named John Sang. In 1845, Fleming and his older brother joined other Scotts who were embarking for ports around the globe to seek their future. They boarded the sailing ship Brilliant bound for Canada after paying the princely sum of 4 Pounds each for their tickets. Their fare promised them, ‘a guaranteed daily quantity of drinkable water and basic uncooked rations’.
Blaise points out there were many similarities between Scotland and Canada: “[They were] two non-countries by the standards of Victorian diplomacy, unrecognized, even threatened, by their powerful southern neighbors. The exuberant reticence of the Scotch – sober, hardworking, calculation to the last penny – was particularly appreciated in the underpopulated void of autonomous colonies called British North American before the 1867 British North America Act that created Canada. Popular opinions of the Scotch were quite a bit more flattering than the general view of their fellow Canadian immigrants, the Irish and French. All had known poverty in their homeland but overnight, it seemed, they had been transformed into hardy transplants in Canada, the United States, or in England itself.” In late life, Fleming would lament the loss of his distinctive accent (known as the ‘north of Tweed’ local dialect); only in Kirkcaldy was he still taken as a ‘native’.
Fleming’s entry into the conversation about standard time zones was triggered by a misprint in a railroad schedule. He had arrived at the Irish rail line station at Bandoran at 5:10 p.m. on a bright July day in 1876. Halfway between Londonderry and Sligo, Fleming was there to catch the 5:35 p.m. Londonderry train. The station was unusually quiet, more so than it should have been for a station expecting an incoming train. He checked the schedule of his Irish Train Traveller’s Guide when the 5:35 appointed time came and went. The schedule said ‘5:35 p.m.’, but when he checked the depot’s big board, it placed the incoming train’s time at ‘5:35 a.m.’.
The misprint in his traveller’s guide cost him 16 hours of his life, but it also set the wheels in motion to change how time keeping would be done around the world. Today, in his home town of Kilcaldy, there is a monument with the inscription reading: “Sir Sanford Flemming, the inventor of standard time for the world.”
So how does one ‘invent’ time? Before the modern system was created, time keeping was strictly a local affair controlled by the Sun or other celestial bodies that ruled the night. A gnomon, (a stick stuck perpendicularly into the ground) was the earliest version of what would become known as a sundial. The simple stick in the ground sundial would be embellished over time and for the upscale, they became works of fine art. Fancy or plain, when the shadow cast was at its shortest, it was noon at that location. Before humans had the means to communicate with far off places, local time was more than enough to keep people happy. Only when communications and transportation between distant areas would the concept of local noon make time keeping more complex.
Fleming’s entry into this complex topic of time came well after he had established himself in Canada. In 1849, he created the Royal Canadian Institute that was formally incorporated in 1851. It began as a professional institute for surveyors and engineers but eventually became involved in more general scientific interests. Working full time as a surveyor for the Grand Trunk Railway placed him in a position to become the Chief Engineer of the Northern Railway of Canada in 1855. One of the biggest contributions he made in this position was advocating for the use of Iron Bridges on the rail lines instead of those constructed of wood. His time with the Northern Railway was marked with conflicts with the general manager he would replace in 1855 (Fredrick W. Cumberland) who would later oust Fleming from that position in 1862.
1863 would find Fleming serving as the chief government surveyor of Nova Scotia overseeing the construction of a rail line from Truro to Pictou. He refused bids he deemed too high and ended up bidding on and completing the work himself by 1867 (for which he saved the government substantial money and earned a good profit for himself). Fleming’s plan for a transcontinental railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific was put before the Canadian government in 1862. Construction of the first part between Halifax and Quebec was contingent upon New Brunswick and Nova Scotia joining the Canadian Federation. This project was also important when travel through Maine became uncertain due to the American Civil War. In 1867, Fleming was appointed as the engineer-in-chief of the Federal Intercolonial Railway project, a position he held until 1876.
In 1871, Fleming assumed the position of Chief Engineer of the Canada Pacific Survey which blazed the final brutal segments of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Though he was bought out of his Survey contract in1880, he became the director of the CPR and was present when the last spike was set. As busy as he was as a railway engineer, he is credited for, “the initial effort that led to the adoption of the present time meridians,” according to our friends at Wikipedia. A paper he wrote in 1876 advocated for what he called, “‘Terrestrial Time’ which he proposed would use a 24 hour clock for the whole world, conceptually located at the center of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian.” He would later refer to this as ‘Cosmopolitan Time’ and then ‘Cosmic Time’. The 24 one-hour time zones he proposed would be lettered ‘A-Y’ while omitting ‘J’ and the zone labeled ‘G’ was arbitrarily assigned to Greenwich, England’s location.
From this rather confusing start, Fleming went on to refine his ideas in papers entitled Time Reckoning, Longitude and Time Reckoning, and Time-Reckoning for the 20th Century. The last pamphlet was published in the Smithsonian Institution’s Annual Report in 1886. In the period between 1881 and 1814, he presented his ideas at international conferences like the Geographical Congress (held in Venice), a meeting of the Geodetic Association (in Rome), and the International Meridian Conference. It was at the IMC that a resolution was passed to mark the beginning of a 24-hour ‘Universal Day’ at midnight at the Greenwich Meridian. The conference added that, “The Universal Day shall not interfere with the use of local or standard time where desirable,” while rejecting Fleming’s time zones further stating, “Time zones were a local issue outside the conference’s purview.”
Figuring out time, obviously, took time. There were many regions who wished to be the Prime Meridian before most agreed Greenwich was an adequate choice. A true 24 hour day would also be adjusted when the ‘anti-meridian’ of 180 degrees was set as the International Date Line, or the designated official start and end of the Universal Day. The IDL is a ‘line of demarcation’ where the date changes – a necessary device to allow for the coordination of the global time zones. Although it was established in 1884, it has no official international legal status meaning some nations (like Kiribati) have adjusted it to keep different sections of the islands that are part of their archipelago on the same calendar day. If one travels across the line from North America toward Asia, the day changes to the next day (e.g. – Monday to Tuesday). Traveling in the opposite direction causes one to revert to the last day (e.g. Tuesday goes back to Monday).
By 1929, the idea of world-wide coordinated time zones had been accepted by all major nations. Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is structured so that there are 12 time zones, each 15 degrees of longitude wide, extending from east and west of the Prime Meridian centered at Greenwich, England. Fleming’s original 24 hour Universal Day is still reflected in the Military’s preference to use a 24 hour clock. I have a vivid memory of visiting K.I.Sawyer Air Force Base near Marquette, Michigan with my buddy Jim and his dad. Jim’s dad was a former flyer who was still working at the base as a civilian and he was afforded a great deal of respect as a pilot who had flown in World War I. When we were getting a tour of the base control tower, one of the airmen saw me looking at the clock on the wall noting the 24 hour day. He laughed and asked, “I bet you never saw a clock like that before, have you?”
Sir Sandford Fleming’s name lives on beyond the historical markers in his hometown of Kilcaldy, Fife, Scotland and elsewhere in Canada. There is also an analemmatic sundial there that was unveiled at the northern end of the seafront promenade in 2022. In Canada, a town, mountain range, an individual mountain, an island, and numerous streets bear his name. Public schools and university buildings named after Fleming are too numerous to list here. Fleming notably designed the Three Penny Beaver Stamp (the first postage stamp for the then Province of Canada) in 1851. He has been commemorated on stamps bearing his likeness in 1977 and 2002 and with a Google Doodle in honor of his 190th birthday on January 7, 2017.
Fleming died at his cottage home near Halifax, Nova Scotia on July 22, 1915 at the age of 88.
His was a life devoted to fine tuning the art of global time among his other engineering pursuits. I wonder how the Time Lord felt about Daylight Saving Time? If he felt that DST would have been fine to leave in place year round, I wish he had written it into his manuscripts. I, for one, would much rather have our northern Michigan daylight hours extended year round, especially during the long, dark nights of December. None-the-less, we have to tip our hat to Sir Sanford for his relentless pursuit of Universal Time. If you wish to take a deeper dive into his life, the book is now available at the Ontonagon Township Library.
Top Piece Video: Who better than to sing about time than The Chambers Brothers – Time Has Come Today