Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time by Clark Blaise

Author:Clark Blaise [Blaise, Clark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction,
ISBN: 978-0-307-76655-7
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2000-11-20T05:00:00+00:00

The Victorian mantra is simple and ringing: Be of practical use to society, serve mankind. What good is theory if it does not improve the lives of common man? This is England’s great departure from the Continental tradition of theory and pure research. It is also an expression of the choice that was facing the United States after the Civil War—adopt the British or German model of higher education?—and it is evident in the thinking of everyone associated with the standard-time movement. Research is fine, ran the popular interpretation; just don’t lose touch with reality. “The later Victorians as a group were men and women of remarkable moral resolution,” writes Richard Altick. “Living in a wasteland strewn with blasted articles of faith, they carried on, with spirit and confidence. What they lost in intellectual assurance and emotional comfort, they compensated for in sheer strength of will.”

Around 1870 the British technical advantage of mid-century stalled. Part of it was the inevitable result of competition with Germany, France, and the United States, but Britain blunted its own growth by failing to increase its investment in technical and scientific education. The emphasis on social utility, the historic scorn for theory and basic research, cost Britain dearly. Sir Lyon Playfair noted that a single German university, for example Strasbourg or Leipzig, received ten thousand pounds more in direct state aid than the half-dozen colleges and universities of Scotland and Ireland together. Holland, with only four million people and four universities—the same in both regards as Scotland—out-spent Scotland nearly fivefold. France, in her determined rebuilding after the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, had asked herself a question that Britain would not raise for another halfcentury: Why could superior men not be found in France at the moment of her peril? One obvious answer was that in 1868, the Sorbonne had received the equivalent of £8,000 in state aid for academic use. By 1885 that amount had climbed to over £3 million. The implications are clear: Britain had retreated into its historic insularity. The rallying voice of Prince Albert had long been stilled. France and Germany had acted on Albert’s assertion that science and research are the source of wealth, power, and progress.

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