5 comments about Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time.

1. The book spends a lot more time talking about Fleming and things going on around the time of his life and less on the specific topic of the creation and adoption of standard time - definitely not what I expected given the title.



2. How could i possibly pass by such a title? As an avid fan of Doctor WHO, the original time lord, captured the eye firmly enough. But this is hardly a book of science fiction, although few novelists could adequately depict the subject. This book is the rendering of one of the 19th Century's most notable autodidacts. An almost penniless emigrant from rural Scotland, Sandford Fleming revolutionised the world's concept of time. In this fascinating, but rather disorganised, account, Blaise weaves numerous themes around Fleming's aim to make the world's time measurement coherent - and universal.
   
   The prompt for Fleming's quest was a missed train in Ireland well into the era of the Industrial Revolution. Driven by steam, that age first used that power to raise water from coal mines. Applied to transportation of goods and people, one of steam's legacies was changing the nature of time. Factory workers now laboured to the clock, and travel speed increased dramatically. Rail travel quickly overtook animal prowess, but also revolutionised our lives. In North America, the spread of the land led to rail companies becoming the index of industry, and a force in politics and society. Each rail company kept time according to its head office. Its schedules granted it dominion over time, leading to such anomalies as the city of St Louis, which observed six different railroad times. This, in addition to the common practice of each town marking its own time by the sun's overhead passage.
   
   Without question, Blaise' most eloquent chapter is "The Aesthetics of Time" in which he renders the influence of changing concepts on time on the arts, notably impressionism and literature. While the world was moving toward more uniform means of dealing with time, the arts recognised that the established "natural time" with its easy, regular flow - "time's arrow" - had been demolished. Readers and viewers came to accept disjointed time in stories and paintings. Blaise uses Cailllebotte's "Paris Street, Rainy Day", which was composed from a string of photographs, as the prime example. Nothing is still and the figures appear detached from "normal" concepts of time. In a similar manner, novelists could break up stories into disconnected parts, skipping about in the chronology to build new forms of narrative. Blaise' own narrative follows their pattern, forcing the reader to accept his irregular presentation. Given the quality of Blaise' insights and ability to discuss them, this book is half the size it might be.
   
   Fleming's missed train kept him apart from most of this social upheaval. A tightly focussed engineer, his aim was standard time around the planet. He understood the desire for a "prime meridian", but wanted a mechanism that would transcend national or commercial interests. He devised a complex scheme with a time centred within the Earth. It would have obsoleted every clock and pocket watch in existence, but had the advantage of universality. Ocean shippers also favoured a standard scheme, with nearly all ships using Greenwich, England as their temporal starting point. Resistance from nations who'd already established their own primes obstructed Fleming's project, which came to a head in Washington, D.C., in 1884. A prolonged, three-week negotiation ultimately led to the standard time zones we live within today. In Blaise's view, Fleming is justifiably renowned for his contribution to this achievement. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]



3. After he set out the initial scene and made narrative inroads, the author proceeded to regale us with his views on time and why they're important. These pseudo-science views could have all made a great short story but had no place interspersing with an actual narrative. It really screamed for a good editor to sit the poor man down and say "No."



4. Most of Time Lord should have been about Sir Sandford Fleming, about how he grew up, about why he left home (Scotland) and crossed the ocean to a new land (Canada), his trials and tribulations, the events of his life, great and small, that shaped this great but mostly forgotten man. Then after three or four hundred pages of this, an author can permit himself to give his personal views in a few pages.
   
   Instead of doing this, Clark Blaise reverses the precepts and gives us 200 pages of his Views on Time and how Deep the Concept is. He gives us a mishmash of poetry and literature and badly thought out espresso philosophy. Nothing about Fleming. I would have loved a day-by-day account of the Prime Meridian conference, or of Fleming's days as chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. No such luck.
   
   After finishing the book, I went to the shortish wikipedia entry on Fleming and found more facts there than in Blaise's book. Until someone writes a better book, that might be the best thing to do.
   
   Vincent Poirier, Tokyo



5. Although Time Lord weighs in at fewer than 250 pages, this book took me a great deal of time to read in part because it constantly put me to sleep. Usually the combination of history/biography/science is favorite of mine, and finding out where our notion of time originated sounded like a fascinating topic to me. In the end, however, the story just isn't that exciting and it felt like the author was padding the book with unrelated filler material.
   
   To be fair, Sir Sanford Fleming is an interesting and admirable character. Intelligent and hard working, he was a self-made man who emigrated from Scotland to North America to seek his fortunes. In addition to the creation of standard time, he was also largely responsible for the trans-Pacific cable and the trans-Canadian railway.
   
   While Fleming's accomplishments are all duly noted by the author, much of the book felt like filler material. Entire chapters are spent waxing philosophical about the "nature of time" and how various notions of time affected everything from art to literature. If you happen to have done postgraduate study in art or literature, you may genuinely enjoy these distractions, but I found them to be a bit too much. Blaise spends as much time (one chapter) discussing Sherlock Holmes as he does discussing the actual Prime Meridian Conference.
   
   Time Lord is not without its pleasures. It is truly fascinating to read how the world worked (or attempted to work) with an infinite number of local times, and how the advent of rail travel in particular created the need for time standardization. It was also interesting and, at times, amusing to study the role politics and national pride (particularly between the British and the French) played in the entire affair. Unfortunately such topics do not constitute the majority of the book, as they are what I was most looking for.
   
   If you or the person you are shopping for enjoy this genre, you might first want to consider The Measure of All Things (which chronicles the creation of the meter) or Pendulum (on the life of Leon Foucault), both of which I found to be more enjoyable reading than Time Lord.

No comments about Adventures of a Physicist: From Peddling News to Making It.

No comments about Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton: Volume 1.

1 comments about A History of the Orchid.

1. This is by far the best book on orchid history ever written. A wealth of information on each historical orchid people that deserve to be there and with their corresponding photo!! It's all here!

   All the other chapters are simply a delight to read. A must have for any orchid people with a sense for the past.

No comments about Memoirs of a Survivor of the Twentieth Century: From Transylvania to the United States.

1 comments about Complexities: Women in Mathematics.

1. While the opportunities for women still lag behind men in some areas, in general there are equal opportunities between the sexes. Most of the women under forty today have no idea how different it was for women thirty years ago. Before the twentieth century, it was even worse. Women such as Sophie Germain had to study mathematics in secret or publish their results under a male byline. This book starts with the biographies of fifteen female mathematicians born before 1920 and chronicles their struggles and achievements. While these biographies are interesting, they are probably too distant to be considered relevant by the modern student. In their other studies, they will have encountered facts such as women lacking the right to vote, so the fifteen women will simply be additional examples of women held in check by the prevailing social and legal norms.
   The real power of the book is in the accounts that are much more recent. Less than fifty years ago, women were rare in mathematics and those who managed to succeed were often considered oddities. Many graduate programs had either formal or informal policies against admitting women and those accepted generally were given little encouragement. Nevertheless, determined women managed to succeed and provide inspiration to future generations of mathematicians. This is their story and they are all to be commended for their success and their willingness to encourage the next generation to succeed. It is largely due to their hard work and occasional suffering that there are now so many opportunities for women in all areas of mathematics. I strongly recommend this book as required reading in any history of mathematics class. It is also suitable as supplemental material for courses in women's studies and the history of education.
   
   Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission.

1 comments about Charles Darwin's Letters: A Selection, 1825-1859 (Canto original series).

1. In May of 2007, the Darwin Correspondence Project, based at Cambridge University, announced that it had placed an additional 5,000 largely unpublished Darwin letters onto its excellent web site (darwin-online.org.uk). This website is a treasurehouse of the first order for anyone interested in Darwin and Victornian intellectual history. Of course, Cambridge University Press has published a number of volumes in its Darwin correspondence series. However, for a quick dip into Darwin's letters, to get a feel from what is there, this collection covering the period up to the publication in 1859 of "Origin" is a handy introduction. The book has a Foreword by the late Stephen Jay Gould which places the letters into the context of what as going on in Victorian science. The editor, Frederick Burkhardt, has added a helpfujl Introduction and "Editor's Note." The letters are in chronological order, the first being written in 1825 while Darwin was studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Next are letters relating to Cambridge, the offer to make the Beagle voyage, the voyage to South America, and Homeward Bound. So there is plenty of coverage of Darwin's epic trip. But the letters continue after his return up until publication of the Origin. The editor has included some helpful notes, a Biographical Register, Bibliography and Bibliographical Note, and suggestions for further reading (a bit out of date since the book was put together in 1996). All together a very nice and inexpensive package loaded with interesting information and providing the opportunity to come more directly into contact with that most scintilating of minds, that of Darwin.

1 comments about House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work.

1. I read this book without many preconceptions about Rachel Carson and found the book engaging and enlightening. She had an interesting life and her affect on the environmental movement is profound.

No comments about Polar Pilot: The Carl Ben Eilson Story.

5 comments about The Flyers: In Search of Wilbur & Orville Wright.

1. boring. Even if you're fascinated by the Wright brothers. That's because the author writes less about the Wrights (who are interesting) than about himself (unbelievably dull). Pretentious junk. Skip it.



2. I lived in Dayton, Ohio, for three years during the late 1960s. I appreciate the nostalgia and reverence Noah Adams captures in his description of Dayton and of the Wright Brothers' exploits.
   
   I remember the huge bombers taking off from Wright-Pat airbase, their somber mission and the fear of nuclear war always a palpable emotion in those years.
   
   Adams captures both the essence of the Wright family and its influence on the world. I never had a chance to see their Oakwood home, but Adams let me feel the ambiance each room in their house and the dynamics between the two brothers and their family.
   
   The visitation of Adams to Kitty Hawk and to Hawthorne Hill accentuates the intensity of those first flights. The added photographs of these historic moments intensifies their importance.
   
   What I would give to have been there in France or in New York harbor when that old-fashioned airplane swooped by.
   
   Larry Rochelle, author of DUST DEVILS, SIREN SORCERY, GULF GHOST and BLUE ICE.



3. This biography on the Wrights is a confused mess. Adams tells the story by visitng locations where the Wrights made history, but during these travels we learn more about his modern day random encounters than what the Wrights actually did there. Adams goes on for pages about capturing moths, a boy and his heroic dog, and other such tales which have nothing to do with the Wrights.
   
   This biography also neglects describe the Wrights childhood and what might have made them the brilliant engineers they became. The book really focuses on everything after the Kitty Hawk flight. This is its biggest strength in describing how they traveled the world to show everyone their flying machine, including moments of triumph and tragedy.
   
   The book finds down by focussing on the Wrights' sisters love affair. I got the feeling that the author felt their needed to be a romance somewhere in the book, and since the Wrights were more focussed on machines than women that he needed to waste our time with this barely relevant affair.



4. This is a great little book. You follow along as Adams revisits many of the places where the Wright Brothers went. Just like any such visitor, he revels in the little things he finds that match up with some bit of the legend, like finding a building where they stayed; or the hospital where Orville was laid up after the first fatal crash. He also finds evidence of the huge impact Wilbur made in France where he was hailed as a hero. Who'd have thought there was a "Wilbur Street" in France?

   No, this is no substitute for those blow-by-blow accounts of each innovation, but it fills in the gaps and adds some chronolgy that others lack. For example, he mentions how Orville's crash happened while Wilbur was in Europe, and how long it had been since Orville had last flown.

   This is a fine book, and if you've ever gone on your own trek to try and get a sense of history by "being there", you won't be able to put it down.




5. The problem with Noah Adams's book is an inability to decide what it wants to be. A Wright Brothers biography? No. A personal memoir? Not really. A Wright Brothers Greatest Hits visit to places intimately connected with their lives? Not that either, although The Flyers certainly has some characteristics of all those three possibilities. While well-written, the book fails to capture the brothers, not really a surprising flaw since they are long dead, their contemporaries are long dead and the Brothers didn't leave much in the way of a written account of their lives. The characters who come most back to life here are their father Bishop Wright and, especially, their lovely and patient sister Katharine. And they breathe on the page precisely because Adams draws frequently and well from their journals and letters. Adams is also good when writing of the places the Wright Brothers flew, such as the Outer Banks of North Carolina and New York. Each chapter starts with a title page photograph and many of them are rare treasures, at least as evocative as Adams's text. One minor annoyance -- the Wrights were famously solitary and family-centered, so the frequent interludes where Adams imagines himself exchanging small talk and daily observations with the Wilbur and Orville ring jarringly untrue.