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important of all, the twenty-four time zones—all came into existence by diplomatic and scientific agreement at the close of the Prime Meridian Conferenceheld in Washington, D.C., October 1–22, 1884. The conference was officially called by President Chester A. Arthur and opened by his redoubtable secretary of state, Frederick Frelinghuysen, but the force behind it, its orchestrator, was Sandford Fleming.
    The standard biographies of Chester Alan Arthur, deservedly one of America’s least celebrated presidents, do not even mention the single great achievement of his term, his role as the host and organizer of the Prime Meridian Conference. It is one of the smaller ironies of American history that a sweeping, international event like the settling of the prime meridian and the protocols of world standard time, which brought a distinguished gathering of leading astronomers and diplomats from the world’s twenty-six independent countries to take part in one of America’s earliest assertions of diplomatic influence on the world stage, should have occurred on Arthur’s otherwise mendacious watch. A month after the Meridian Conference, as related in Adam Hochschild’s
King Leopold’s Ghost
, his friends were conniving with the agents of the imperial powers carving up, all too literally, the African continent.
    In one way, however, Chester Arthur was perfectly placed by history to understand the issues of standard time. He worked well with entrenched power, particularly the railroad establishment, and was disinclined to challenge it. Prior to his assuming high national office, the spoils system had installed him as customs chief of New York Harbor. The same Republican-party machinery placed him on the 1880 ticket with James Garfield. The presidency was then handed to him by an assassin’s bullet. With his gracious manners, charm, honorable Civil War and antislavery record, his basic decency—and those impressive ax-blade muttonchops—he embodied the plush, don’t-rock-the-boat certainties of the Gilded Age. He knew railroads, counting many a rail baron among his friends and patrons, and loved to travel in luxury accommodations. It could be said with a certaindegree of admiration that he was one of the least ambitious men ever to hold the office. Yet if any American president, apart from polymaths like Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, or perhaps Jimmy Carter, understood the value of standardization in weights and measures and the role of railroads in forcing change, it might well have been Chester Alan Arthur.

2
Time and Democracy
    THE WIDER , extended narrative of standard time started before that day in Bandoran, Ireland, in 1876, and did not end in the Washington conference in 1884. It did not even start with the involvement of Sandford Fleming. Fleming was the catalyst, the man with a vision at the tipping point, when conventional responses to a growing problem were no longer sustainable.
    Standard time culminated the long march of reason that had begun with the Renaissance. It coincided with the harnessing of a power source that transcended the mechanical limits of human and animal muscle. Perhaps the first great technological advance leading to the Industrial Age began with nothing grander than a teakettle and a curious, anonymous child who observed its top rattling and lifting under the build-up of steam. If so little water so inefficiently channeled could do
that
, what might more steam, aimed and tightly directed, do? What others saw as a noisy irritation, someone saw as a cheap, easily imitated power-source. Perhaps he grew up to be Giovanni Branca, who in 1628 created a crude steam turbine. Or perhaps he had the misfortune to have been born in France as Solomon of Caus and be confined to an asylum by Cardinal Richelieu for theorizing that the power of steam could out-perform man and beast. In the 1690s steam was powering Thomas Savery’s inefficient vacuum “fountain” pump, but a decade later Thomas