Time Lord

Even by Victorian standards, the Scots/Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming was a man of extraordinary energy - he was the designer of Canada's first postage stamp and the first street maps of Canadian cities. He was also engineer of the trans-Canadian railway to British Columbia. Time Lord tells the story of yet another achievement - Fleming's greatest - his idea of unifying the world's times in a series of time zones, an idea originally rejected as too trivial for discussion by the Royal Canadian Society of Engineers for whom he wrote his first paper on the subject. Twenty years later, after a series of journeys to the British astronomer-Royal, the Czar's Astronomer, the courts of Prussia, Italy and Japan and finally the American President, and after opposition from many quarters, the world adjusted its clocks and accepted Fleming's new system. It is an extraordinary story, wonderfully illuminating of the past, and of a fascinating man, difficult, irascible, but ultimately brilliant.