A Brief talk on the life and times of Sir Sandford Fleming – A very special freemason.
At the meeting of Middlesex Masters (Uxbridge) Lodge No 9292 held on Saturday 7th December, the members were presented with an extremely interesting lecture on the Scottish Canadian freemason Sir Sandford Fleming. This was given by W. Bro Darryll Boot PPrGSuptWks at short notice. Of course, the immediate response which you might have expected was Sandford Who? Even though it appeared that nobody had ever heard of him, it would turn out in the course of the presentation that he had made an indelible impression with his ideas which still have an important resonance in our daily lives in the 21st century.
Stanford Fleming was born on the 7th January 1827, in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland to Andrew and Elizabeth Fleming. His Father was a carpenter, and he was one of eight children. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed as a surveyor with an engineer named John Sang. In Scotland at this time the railways were expanding very quickly and would often accompany Sang on his trips to survey the routes.
In April 1845, at the age of 18, he emigrated with his older brother David and cousin Henry, to colonial Canada on a ship called ‘The Brilliant”. The voyage took five weeks. The plan was to find work, buy land and then get the rest of the family to join them.
He subsequently became a surveyor, an engineer, an inventor and scientist. He drew up plans for buildings, roads and hundreds of miles of railways, and although Scottish designed Canada’s first stamp, the three-penny beaver, in 1851.
He pressed for an undersea communication cable to be laid all the way from Canada to Australia, which was completed in 1902.
In studying solutions to the problem of time variations along a single rail route, he advocated the adoption of a standard, or mean time, with hourly variations from it according to a system of time zones. He also instigated the adoption of the 24 hour clock to avoid confusion between antemeridian and postmeridian time which we commonly shorten to am and pm. The prime meridian runs through Greenwich, UK, as we are aware. Essentially by standardising time zones it would make a substantial difference to travel in that instead of having countries with their individual time zones, there would be a standard across the world adjusted in relation to GMT. Each 15 degree section to the east would be an hour later and correspondingly each 15 degree section to the west would be an hour earlier. Indeed, before standardisation you could have had a Middlesex Time Zone and why not? Not all countries adopted the new “science” straight away and India in particular did not standardise until 1905. The adoption of a single time zone for the whole of India is still a bone of contention as the geographical stretch from east to west is roughly 30 degrees of longitude.
His efforts were instrumental in the convening in 1884 the International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., at which the current internationally accepted system of standard time zones was adopted. His accomplishments also were well known worldwide, and in 1897 he was knighted by Queen Victoria, and yet his name remains known by only a few.
Also, and probably most importantly, he was a freemason, having joined St Andrew’s Lodge No 1 [Now No 16] in York. Ontario, [now Toronto].
W. Bro Darryl was warmly applauded by those present for his talk which not only highlighted the achievements of this remarkable individual, but was even more gratifying is that he was a freemason and his contribution to GMT, now referred to as UTC or CUT ( Universal Time Coordinated or Coordinated Universal Time) plays such an important and significant part in our lives.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandford_Fleming
https://freemasonrytoronto.com/
https://digitalarchive.tpl.ca/objects/293635/letter-st-andrews-lodge-no-16-grc-masonic-hall-t
