This is the biography of an idea, and the remarkable story of the man who created and then convinced the world to adopt a unified standard for telling time. Today we take the accurate telling of time across the world for granted. Yet little more than a hundred years ago, people even in neighbouring towns lived by different time schedules: noon was simply whenever the sun happened to be overhead Toronto time, for example, was different from Hamilton time some forty miles away. None of this mattered when people travelled in ...
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This is the biography of an idea, and the remarkable story of the man who created and then convinced the world to adopt a unified standard for telling time. Today we take the accurate telling of time across the world for granted. Yet little more than a hundred years ago, people even in neighbouring towns lived by different time schedules: noon was simply whenever the sun happened to be overhead Toronto time, for example, was different from Hamilton time some forty miles away. None of this mattered when people travelled in the slow style that had been the norm for generations. But then, as Clark Blaise makes vividly clear, trains arrived and in the new age of communications myriad local times became a mind-boggling obstacle, and the rational ordering of time an urgent priority. Sandford Fleming, a young emigrant from Scotland, performed the remarkable task of solving the unfathomable temporal riddle of how to knit together a world stippled with thousands of local times. That invention was the start of an exhausting campaign to persuade the squabbling international powers, the diplomats and scientists, to adopt a unified time system a campaign that came to a dramatic conclusion at the Prime Meridian Conference in 1884. His achievement turned out to be one of the greatest gifts of the Victorian Age to our global modern world. This was the great "Decade of Time," as Blaise calls it, that extraordinary ten years that also saw the invention of electric light, the telephone, Impressionism and high-speed cameras. "Time Lord "is an absorbing reflection on the mythic origins of time itself, as well as a meditation on science, psychiatry, art and literature (from Dickens to Sherlock Holmes to Hemingway); the roots of depression and anxiety; and the results of one man's fascination with clocks and watches and railway schedules. At the heart of the story is the mild but fierce-minded communications genius who sketched and surveyed his way from coast to coast, oversaw the building of the great Canadian railroad, designed the first Beaver stamp, and invented the world-circling, sub-Pacific cable; who saw the world as a whole and changed its nature forever."
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Add this copy of Time Lord: the Remarkable Canadian Who Missed His Train to cart. $11.26, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Brownstown, MI, UNITED STATES, published 2001 by Knopf Canada.
Add this copy of Time Lord the Remarkable Canadian Who Missed His Train to cart. $11.99, like new condition, Sold by A Good Read rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Toronto, ON, CANADA, published 2001 by Knopf.
Add this copy of Time Lord: the Remarkable Canadian Who Missed His Train to cart. $27.99, like new condition, Sold by A Good Read rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Toronto, ON, CANADA, published 2001 by Knopf Canada.
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Fine in Fine dust jacket. 0676972527. A Good Read ships from Toronto and Niagara Falls, NY-customers outside of North America please allow two to three weeks for delivery. Flat-signed by author on title page.; Minor wear to upper tips of d/j.; 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall; Signed by Author.
Add this copy of Time Lord: the Remarkable Canadian Who Missed His Train to cart. $43.45, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2001 by Knopf Canada.
Add this copy of Time Lord Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of to cart. $53.00, like new condition, Sold by A Good Read rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Toronto, ON, CANADA, published 2001 by Knopf Canada.
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Seller's Description:
Fine in Fine dust jacket. 0676972527. A Good Read ships from Toronto and Niagara Falls, NY-customers outside of North America please allow two to three weeks for delivery.; 0.9 x 8.3 x 5.7 Inches; 272 pages; Signed by Author.
Add this copy of Time Lord: the Remarkable Canadian Who Missed His Train to cart. $83.51, new condition, Sold by GridFreed rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from North Las Vegas, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2001 by Toronto: Knopf 2000.
