Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/818

798 in the United States and Canada that the complication of the numerous time-standards then in use on the various railways forced attention to the matter. To Mr. Sandford Fleming, the constructor of the Intercolonial Railway 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 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use only five standard times, four, five, six, seven, and eight hours respectively later than Greenwich, a suggestion originally made in 1875 by Professor Benjamin Peirce.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 meridian 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 General 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 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 susceptibilities to general expediency.