The Hon. Donald Smith drives home the last spike for the Canadian Pacific Railway in Eagle Pass, B.C., on Nov. 7, 1885. The tall man standing behind him with the top hat is Sir Sandford Fleming, the father of standard time. The Canadian Press/National Archives of Canada
Commentary
In July 1876, Sandford Fleming, a Scottish Canadian engineer, was standing on an Irish railway platform fuming—he had misread his timetable, confusing a.m. and p.m., and as a result had missed his train. Spurred by this inconvenience, Fleming began thinking how a 24-hour clock would have made this sort of mistake impossible. But his highly inventive mind did not stop there: he had visions of worldwide time zones, 24 of them around the globe, each comprising 15 degrees of longitude and each an hour different.
