Time Lord: The Remarkable Canadian Who Missed His Train and Changed the… (2000)

Have you ever imagined what life was like before time zones? Every village had their own time. Noon was when the sun stood directly overhead. New Year's Eve was a wave of celebration that spread town-by-town across the country. None of this was really a problem until the advent of railways. All of a sudden you had to explain to people at both ends of a route what time the train was leaving and arriving. You can imagine the confusion.

Time Lord is marketed as a biography of Sir Sanford Fleming, but it's really much broader than that. It's a history of the late Victorian era when people's understanding of time radically shifted. Blaise's work draws significantly on literature to describe people's attitudes towards time.

Fleming is the perfect candidate through which to explore this era. He's known for three main things: surveying a good portion of Canada's cross-country railroad, leading the world to a conference where time was standardized, and laying a world-circling sub-Pacific cable. All three major elements of life swirl around the question of what time is and how it should be described.

Some might feel that the book meanders a little too much. One of the chapters, for example, is almost exclusively devoted to Sherlock Holmes. I, on the other hand, found the leisurely journey through the late nineteenth-century quite fascinating. ( )

I found this book very interesting.

Time is something that we don't even think about anymore. Ok, we think about time, about how much we need, or don’t have but we don’t actually think about the mechanics of time, how it was decided that the day starts at midnight and midnight started when and everything else that it entails.

When did space & time become an inseparable pair? When did time start to matter? What did people do before standard time?

This book explains about when time started to matter, when the steam engine, trains and the telegraph became prevalent and life started to move faster. Before the train it didn’t matter that you lost an ‘hour of time’ for every 1000 miles, no one could travel or communicate fast enough for it to matter. It covers how European thought and American thought were different and why. and of course it talks about Sir sanford Fleming and how he influenced Canada and time as we know it. ( )