Sir Sandford Fleming

Sir Sandford Fleming (born Jan. 7, 1827, Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scot.—died July 22, 1915, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Can.) was a civil engineer and scientist who was the foremost railway engineer of Canada in the 19th century.

Fleming emigrated in 1845 from Scotland to Canada, where he was trained as an engineer. By 1857 he had become chief engineer for the Ontario, Simcoe, and Huron Railway (now part of the Canadian National Railway). In 1863 he was chosen by the Canadian government to conduct a survey for the route of the first link—from Quebec City to Halifax—of a proposed railway to run from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He became chief engineer for the construction of the resulting Intercolonial Railway (also part of the Canadian National Railway). In 1871 he became engineer-in-chief of the proposed Canadian Pacific Railway, and the routes he surveyed through the Kicking Horse and other passes greatly aided Canadian railway construction in the ensuing decades. Fleming retired from his post with the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1880.

After his retirement Fleming served as chancellor (1880–1915) of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., and devoted himself to scientific projects and writing. Railway travel across great distances in Canada and the United States had rendered obsolete the old practice wherein different regions set their clocks according to local astronomical conditions. In studying solutions to this problem, Fleming advocated the adoption of a standard, or mean, time with hourly variations from it according to a system of time zones. His efforts were instrumental in the convening (1884) of the International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., at which the current internationally accepted system of standard time zones was adopted. Fleming was also a forceful advocate of a telegraph communication system for the British Empire, the first link of which was a Pacific cable between Canada and Australia (1902). Additionally, Fleming designed Canada’s first postage stamp, the threepenny beaver (1851). He was knighted in 1897.