Time Lord by Clark Blaise

Time Lord by Clark Blaise

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.

Clark Blaise (1940-) is a Canadian-American novelist who has published 20 works of fiction and nonfiction. Blaise has taught writing and literature at Emory, Skidmore, Columbia, NYU, Sir George Williams, UC-Berkeley, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the David Thompson University Centre, and is a longtime supporter of the literary arts in North America. He developed Concordia University's postgraduate Creative Writing Department in 1968, and later served as Director of Iowa's International Writing Program (1990-1998) and President of the Society for the Study of the Short Story (2002-present). Blaise has been honored internationally for his contributions to the subject, receiving an Arts and Letters Prize for Writing from the American Academy in 2003 and being named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2010. Blaise now splits his time between New York and San Francisco, where he lives with his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, an American novelist.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780375401763
ISBN 10	0375401768
Title	Time Lord
Author	Clark Blaise
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Pantheon Books
Year published	2001-04-10
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.