Sir Sanford grew up in the small Scottish
port of Kirkaldy and came to Ontario in 1845 as an 18-year-old immigrant, hoping
to turn his training as a draftsman and surveyor into a career in Canada.
Sir Sanford's fascination with the clock
began in the mid-1870s, after he spent 16 hours stranded in an Irish railway
station because of a typographical error that confused a.m. with p.m.
Such confusion was common then, for there
were almost as many time zones as towns. The traditional way of establishing the
correct time was to designate noon as the moment that the sun lay directly
overhead. To see the implications, just imagine taking the train from Halifax to
Windsor and having to reset your watch in Saint John, Quebec City, Montreal,
Kingston, Belleville, Toronto, Hamilton, Brantford, London and Windsor.
Sir Sanford began researching the subject.
By 1878, he was telling the Canadian Institute for the Advancement of Scientific
Knowledge that there should be a prime meridian from which all nations would
measure time in 24 standard zones, each covering 15 degrees of longitude. All
clocks in each zone would be set to read the same time.
Fleming must have been convincing. First,
North America's railways adopted his system. Then, in 1879, Washington hosted an
International Prime Meridian Conference and that conference officially
instituted Standard Time.
It was quite a triumph for the man whose
journey to success began with an Atlantic crossing so rough that Sir Sanford and
his elder brother David wrote a farewell letter to their family and tossed it
overboard in a sealed bottle.
David Fleming, a skilled carpenter and
woodworker, found work almost as soon as the brothers reached Toronto. But Sir
Sanford spent weeks searching for work and hearing discouraging news from people
he had been told could help him.
Undaunted, he began to get the experience
and education he needed to become a full-fledged land surveyor. In the early
days, he drew the town plans for Peterborough and Cobourg and the official map
of the Newcastle and Colborne districts. Sir Sanford was a man of vast
imagination and energy. Before he died in Ottawa, in 1915, his other
accomplishments would include:
- Founding the Royal Canadian Institute
- Designing Canada's first postage stamp, the
three-penny beaver
- Playing a key role in surveying and building the
railways that stitched Canada together from the Atlantic to the Pacific
