false http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1189007971m/1837054.jpg 1837054 1 In the 1880s, a businessman traveling by train from New York to Boston needed, on arrival, to adjust his clock, moving it ahead by 12 minutes. The strange increment, writes Clark Blaise, was a matter of local interpretation, some enterprising Bostonian having determined that the rising sun touched the shore of Massachusetts a dozen minutes before warming Manhattan.<p> Such local interpretations of time made the job of establishing railroad schedules a matter of guesswork and hope, as the Canadian entrepreneur Sandford Fleming discovered when he missed a train in the west of Ireland in 1876. Frustrated, Fleming realized that a new system of universal time would need to be created if railroad travel were ever to realize its full potential. As Blaise writes, "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," and nations such as England that had a system of standard time in place owed much of their economic superiority to the predictability and reliability such a system put in place.<p> Fleming discovered that getting the world onto the same schedule required years of negotiating and browbeating, a nightmare that Blaise ably recounts. Fleming's efforts eventually paid off, and as Blaise writes, "Of all the inventions of the Industrial Age, standard time has endured, virtually unchanged, the longest." His entertaining account of how that came to be will be of appeal to readers who enjoyed Dava Sobel's <I>Longitude</I>, Henry Petroski's <I>The Pencil</I>, and other popular works in the history of technology. <I>--Gregory McNamee</I> 1837078 23 4 2002 Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time total:1|5:1| 1 5 4 0 1837054 0375727523 9780375727528 1 0 5.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1189007971m/1837054.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1837054.Time_Lord_Sir_Sandford_Fleming_and_the_Creation_of_Standard_Time 5 0 false Wed Dec 03 17:52:36 -0800 2008 Thu Jan 22 11:53:33 -0800 2009 1837054 0375727523 9780375727528 1 0 5.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1189007971m/1837054.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1837054.Time_Lord_Sir_Sandford_Fleming_and_the_Creation_of_Standard_Time 0 0 false Thu Nov 13 19:33:50 -0800 2008 Thu Nov 13 19:33:50 -0800 2008 1837054 0375727523 9780375727528 1 0 5.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1189007971m/1837054.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1837054.Time_Lord_Sir_Sandford_Fleming_and_the_Creation_of_Standard_Time 0 0 false Fri Jul 04 05:30:16 -0700 2008 Fri Jul 04 05:30:16 -0700 2008 1837054 0375727523 9780375727528 1 0 5.00 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1189007971m/1837054.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1837054.Time_Lord_Sir_Sandford_Fleming_and_the_Creation_of_Standard_Time 0 0 false Sun Jan 02 00:00:00 -0800 2005 Mon Apr 21 14:42:13 -0700 2008 Mon Apr 21 14:42:13 -0700 2008 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=1837054