As a teenager, I was habitually late for school. No matter how many times I set my watch by the school clock, I'd still be late. And I have Sir Sanford Fleming to blame for this. v Who is that, you may ask? Fleming was the inventor of Standard Time -- the division of the world into 24 time zones, each one hour apart. If it wasn't for his idea that everyone's clocks in a given geographic area should be set to the same time, all the time, I would have been on time -- on someone's watch, somewhere. He ruined it for all of us who have problems with tardiness.
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And here's the kicker: I was cruelly destined to go to a high school named after Fleming, in Toronto, Ontario.
Fleming was a Scotsman who immigrated to Canada in the 1820s. He became a noted surveyor and railroad engineer and was a leader in establishing the nation's transcontinental railroad system. He also designed Canada's first postage stamp in 1851.
In this era, people's Day Timers chronicle their activities, and they can count on their neighbors' Day Timers referring to the same hours and minutes as theirs.
But just 125 years ago, traveling to the next town meant changing your pocket watch to a new time, because each locality established its own timekeeping standard. A town clock would be the official time and people would set their pocket watches and clocks to correspond with it.
That made things difficult for people trying to arrange or keep appointments. People traveling between cities had to change their watches when they got to their destinations. Traveling between states only made the problem worse.
With the advent of the railroad, transportation from town to town became significantly quicker than by horse-drawn carriage. A three-day trek was usually shortened to one-day.
But schedules in the early years of the railroads were confusing, since each stop was based on a different local time. As North American rails began to stitch states and territories together, making public travel more efficient and more popular, Fleming pushed his idea for a standard system for keeping time.
Without a standard system of keeping time, he contended, not only did passengers never know exactly when they needed to be at a station, but trains ran the risk of head-on collisions if different time standards were in force along the same stretch of track.
In 1878, Fleming designed the worldwide time zones that are still in use today.
While he wasn't the first person to come up with the idea for standardizing time, he did take the lead in implementing it, and his distinctive approach -- 24 zones, each 15 degrees of longitude apart -- was the system everyone adopted.
U.S. railroad companies began applying Fleming's standard time zones in November 1883. A year later, experts gathered in Washington D.C. for the International Prime Meridian Conference to standardize world time and select the prime meridian.
The conference's delegates from 27 nations selected Greenwich, England, as zero degrees longitude, or the starting point for internationalized time. The time in Greenwich became known as Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT.
The delegates also established the international dateline at 180 degrees, on the opposite side of the globe from the prime meridian.
That's the spot where a new day officially begins. When it's exactly midnight at the international dateline, the earth has the same date everywhere on the globe. But as the international dateline rotates eastward with the globe, the new day follows it. After one hour, a sliver of the Pacific Ocean side of the globe has the new date. After six hours, a quarter of the globe has the new date.
As the dateline keeps rotating around earth's axis, the portion of the globe covered by the new date keeps growing and the area covered by the old date keeps shrinking, until the international dateline once again hits the midnight spot opposite the sun.
Though most of the U.S. began to adhere to time zones by 1895, Congress didn't make time zones mandatory until the Standard Time Act of 1918. Today, there are nine times zones in the U.S. and its territories: Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Alaska, Hawaii-Aleutian, Samoa, Wake Island, and Guam.
Some places in the world, however, hew to their own methods of time-keeping. China, for example, has one time zone, while it ought to have five under Fleming's system.
Newfoundland in Canada is a half-hour later than its neighboring province, rather than an hour.
And in another time anomaly, Arizona, Hawaii and parts of Indiana still don't move their clocks back for Daylight Saving Time.
Even Daylight Saving Time was, for a while, a confusing endeavor. (Many people make the mistake of pronouncing it "daylight savings" -- it flows better, but is incorrect.)
The idea behind the time change was to give people more daylight hours in the summer during their normal daily cycles -- the sun would rise an hour later when many were still sleeping or just getting up, but it would set an hour later when most people were awake -- and coincidentally to cut down on electricity use in the evenings by having daylight last later into the day.
The Department of Transportation says that observing Daylight Saving Time saves the equivalent in energy of 10,000 barrels of oil each day.
In the early 1960s, observance of Daylight Saving Time was still inconsistent, with no established system for when to change clocks.
A transportation industry organization, the Committee for Time Uniformity, began pushing for standardization in 1962. The New York Times ran a supportive piece on the group on its front page, after discovering that on the 35-mile stretch of Route 2 between Moundsville, W.Va., and Steubenville, Ohio, travelers had to endure seven time changes.
Since then, with few exceptions, the U.S. has changed clocks twice a year, in April and October, to switch to Daylight Saving Time and then back to standard time.
One exception to this occurred after the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East in 1973. When members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries instituted an embargo against the sale of oil to Israel's Western allies, Congress put most of the nation on Daylight Saving Time for two years to save additional energy as gasoline prices jumped 40 percent.
Dave Gordon is a freelance writer.
