In 1904, a fire destroyed 1,500 buildings in Baltimore, partly because the out-of-town firefighters called in to battle the blaze couldn’t connect their hoses to the city’s fire hydrants. The hoses and hydrants used incompatible couplings. A subsequent federal investigation found the lack of standardization was rampant: Municipalities around the country used 600 different varieties of couplings.

As Fleming saw when he set about getting the world to agree on a common approach to time: Without standards, the game falls apart.

Before the world was divided into 24 time zones, and before each day began at midnight on the Greenwich prime meridian, and before the international date line kept the calendar in balance, every settlement with a need to know the time kept its own official clock. Time was based on the solar noon, that shadowless, sundial moment when the sun appears to stand directly overhead.

Because the sun keeps moving (or, more properly, the earth keeps revolving) at 12½ miles a minute along the most populated latitude in North America, it was just 11:55 a.m. in the Delaware Valley, 60 miles west of New York City, when the noon whistles were blowing in lower Manhattan. In Newark, N.J., across the Hudson River, it was 11:59 a.m. Adjacent villages clung jealously to their particular time. Travel and communication between them were slow enough that the resulting confusion was manageable.

But in 1869, with the linking of the American coasts by rail, the country’s inner rhythm, that inherited sense of ordered time and space whose defining engines had been the horse and the sail metered by the sun, was ripped apart, never to return. The fact that a train could cover 100 miles in less than two hours forced people to address the question of which town’s time was official. Should a train’s arrival and departure schedule be reported based on the time in each town along the route? Based on the time where the train originated? Based on the time at the headquarters of the railroad? Who "owned" the time?

The Pennsylvania Railroad maintained Philadelphia time along its entire route, while the New York Central kept the "Vanderbilt time" of Grand Central Station. If a passenger wondered when he might arrive at his final destination, in terms of one of the 144 official local times that existed in the U.S., he had to know its time standard, plus that of the railroad taking him there, and then make the proper conversions. Passengers transferring between lines in the middle of a trip had even more complicated calculations to make.

Upon entering larger stations, American passengers would study clocks set along a wall behind the ticket counter, each announcing the time standards of competing railroads. The clocks would not read "New York," "Chicago," or "New Orleans," but "Erie & Lackawanna," "New York Central," and "Baltimore & Ohio." Each clock reflected the standard at the company’s headquarters. No wonder Oscar Wilde said the chief occupation in an American’s life was "catching trains."

The profusion of time standards began to raise other questions. At whose midnight, for example—yours or the company headquarters’—might an insurance policy run out or a new law take effect?

Within the Decade of Time, from 1875 to 1885, the contradictions between new technology and old time-reckoning passed from mere inconvenience and inefficiency to urgency and, finally, to danger. Railroad accidents were daily events, an inevitability considering that trains on the same track might be employing different times. Ships of different nationalities often could not communicate their positions or share their knowledge of dangers at sea because they derived their bearings from different meridians—11 were competing to be designated as the prime meridian for navigational purposes.

When America’s chief weather forecaster, Cleveland Abbe, received his dozens of hourly telegraph messages from offices around the country, he had to translate all the local transmission times into a single "real time" to track the movement of storm fronts and weather patterns. U.S. President Chester A. Arthur wrote, "In the absence of a common and accepted standard for the computation of time for other than astronomical purposes, embarrassments are experienced in the ordinary affairs of modern commerce."

Meanwhile, technology kept evolving, and the velocity of the culture continued to increase as the telegraph, telephone, and other inventions helped shape the modern world.

By the middle of the 1870s, the assertion of human reason over the processes of nature was yielding discoveries and inventions that lent that famous Victorian confidence to the notion that man was no longer the passive inheritor of an ordained "natural" universe. All of nature was his to discover and mold. He had the ability to communicate instantaneously by voice, to light the dark, to build luxurious trans-Atlantic steamers, the transcontinental railroads, and a new personal printing press called the typewriter. But the outworn shell of time, those heavy boots inherited from tradition, from nature, were impeding progress.

Here, Sandford Fleming enters the scene. At 5:10 p.m. on a bright July day in 1876, in the country station of Bandoran, Ireland, a balding figure with a salt-and-pepper mattress-stuffer of a beard, wearing a gentleman’s formal frock coat, alighted from a horse-drawn taxi 25 minutes before the scheduled arrival of the Londonderry train. At 5:35 p.m., nothing came. When Fleming checked, he found that his Irish Railroad Travelers’ Guide was mistaken. The train was to arrive at 5:35 a.m. Fleming, chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway, would be a prisoner for the night in Bandoran station. In those hours, a plan took form that would define the Decade of Time.

As Fleming thought the problem over, he concluded that the error was more than a misprint. It was the opening into an industrial underworld of fallacy and inefficiency. Correcting the error was not an editorial step; it was an engineering project. The whole system of numbering was wrong. Why double-count the hours, one to 12, twice a day? Are we so stupid that we cannot compute above the number 12? Why worry about a.m. and p.m.?

Fleming’s initial proposal—delivered four months later—combined 24 standard time zones with a single, universal time for the world and a 24-hour clock so that, say, 5:35 p.m. would be transformed to 17:35h. The plan’s central difficulty was its failure to endorse a prime meridian, a place where the time zones for the world were to begin. The popular choice would have been Greenwich, England, given that most of the world’s shipping employed charts that used Greenwich as the starting point for measuring longitude. But Fleming was afraid that picking Greenwich would arouse "national susceptibilities," a euphemism for resistance from the French, whose Paris meridian was nine minutes, 22 seconds ahead of Greenwich’s.

From the moment Fleming made his initial proposal, he became the focus of time reform for the world. He began to interpose himself into the debate through papers delivered at the Canadian Institute and his membership in American engineering societies. He was a friend of the rich and powerful in Montreal, London, New York, and Toronto and became something of a spokesman, cultivating dozens of organizations in Canada, the U.S., and, eventually, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia.

His message: A world with too many times is a world without time at all.

The issue of standard time was—despite the concerns about the French—generally free of politics. Fleming’s opponents were normally scientists and academics, from whom he could expect a certain level of civility. There were a few testy encounters, but disagreements for the most part were conducted on a suitably elevated plane.

Fleming received a warm welcome during the World Geodesic Congress in Venice in 1881 when he discussed his core beliefs. His proposals were approved and became the basis of the congress’s recommendation for action. Fleming was urged to organize an international conference of diplomats and astronomers to set a prime meridian for the world. He immediately set to work with personal memos and speeches to American chambers of commerce, railroad conventions, and shipping and insurance companies, as well as with more formal approaches through, among others, the British Colonial Office.

In the meantime, individual countries had been moving toward standardization on their own. By 1883, North American railroads—pressed on one side by passengers outraged by competing and often unpredictable time standards, and on the other by fears that the government would intervene in their affairs—had standardized their times into four zones. Britain, France, Sweden, and Switzerland all recognized single national times—though the times were not coordinated with one another. Germany, which had observed five official times, indicated its endorsement for a single Berlin time, primarily to help coordinate military mobilization.

After much work by Fleming behind the scenes, President Arthur—in one of America’s earliest assertions of diplomatic influence on the world stage—officially called for the International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., in October 1884.

As 19 of the invited 25 "civilized," or independent, countries recognized by the U.S. convened, Fleming understood that an overtly British-American solution to the prime-meridian dilemma would antagonize the French and result in the loss of the desired consensus. French intellectual prestige among other Latin countries might well drag many South American and some European countries with her. So, Fleming nurtured Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Belgian support.

In the end, Fleming didn’t get everything he wanted. The prime meridian wasn’t established in the Pacific Ocean, but in Greenwich, where the world day, the counting of the new 24 time zones, the astronomer’s day, and all civil time for all societies would begin at midnight. As Fleming had expected, the choice of Greenwich didn’t please the French, who waited until 1911 to adopt the world’s standard time.

Fleming’s proposal for an international date line was adopted in 1884.

The last year in human history with too many times, but no place for starting and ending them, was over. A great hinge had creaked shut and the world had been fundamentally altered. Sundial time was banished; a sophisticated abstraction had taken its place. Thanks to standardization, we had the man-made tools to calculate that New York’s 4 o’clock was simultaneously Chicago’s 3 o’clock, or London’s 9 o’clock.

The adoption of standard time had a cascading effect on other forms of standardization. For instance, many railroads—whose needs had done so much to drive the international agreement on time—agreed on track gauges, couplers, and safety standards. Even freight rates and wage scales became much more standard.

It can be said that the adoption of standard time for the world was as necessary for commercial advancement as the invention of the elevator was for modern urban development. In Fleming’s 88 years, the world redefined itself as profoundly as during any interval in human history.

Of all of the inventions of the Industrial Age, standard time has endured, virtually unchanged, the longest. Fleming’s moment of frustration in 1876 became a pinhole through which history and culture were projected.

From Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time by Clark Blaise. Copyright ©2001. Reprinted with permission from Pantheon Books.