Dimensions
130 x 197 x 18mm
Sir Sanford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time.
Soaring bridges, plunging tunnels: the great monuments of Victorian engineering still amaze us; in their trains and ships we see the ancestors of our own feats of engineering. Yet the most enduring achievement of nineteenth-century know-how is altogether easier to miss: the invention and adoption of Standard Time.
It was thanks to a Scottish emigrant in Canada, Sir Sandford Fleming, that the world first harmonised watches; he it was who first divided the vast continents into time zones. Of all the great Scots inventors, Fleming is the least well known, yet the consequences of his work have been unimaginably far-reaching.
As Clark Blaise shows in this engrossingly biography, Fleming was one of the prime movers of modernity: it is no exaggeration to suggest that he shaped the world we now inhabit. Others may have made their marks on the earth, but he actually engineered our time and space, with profound implications not only for science but for human consciousness.
