One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity (review)

This book examines the historical origins of three different facets of our present experience of time—the International Date Line, the use of time zones and the international acceptance of Greenwich as the prime meridian, and daylight-saving time. All forsake local sun time in favor of conventions that allow a ready coordination of time telling around the globe or (in the case of summer) the perceived advantages of maximizing sunlight in the evening.

The least complicated story has the longest history. Bartky’s discussion of the dateline follows ships’ logs and accounts of travelers’ meetings from the circumnavigation of Ferdinand Magellan to the early twentieth century to see how sailors and settlers dealt with the consequences of moving in a westerly or easterly direction for their calendar reckonings. The line of demarcation between days of Asian or European/American dating has always reflected the different directions of colonization and commerce of Pacific settlements (like Macao, the Philippines, Fiji, and the early nineteenth-century Russian enclave at Fort Ross in California). It recognizes the dating kept by different localities rather than international agreement.

In contrast, the questions of a prime meridian and time zones were covered in promotional publications, conference sessions, committee meetings, and legislation. The unification of timekeeping and mapmaking practices on national and international scales became important for (some) railway managers and scientists from the 1870s onward, but it occurred only gradually and in piecemeal fashion. Bartky’s analysis moves from scientific congresses airing the concerns of different disciplinary communities (especially geographers, astronomers, meteorologists, and hydrographists) to the work of key promoters like Sandford Fleming, and eventual government implementation.

The great strength of this book lies in following the treatment of common questions through these different theaters, and different national contexts. In both the United States in 1883 and Austria-Hungary and Germany in the early 1890s, the standardization of times by railroads was clearly the major factor leading to unification, and the subsequent implementation of zone time in civil affairs. The final major steps to present practice occurred when the French government adopted Greenwich time in 1911 and the Greenwich meridian in 1914.

Bartky’s careful account of American, British, and French developments is more convincingly detailed than his treatment of the German-speaking world—especially in his treatment of daylight-savings time.¹ The most significant champion of the need to prevent “the waste of daylight” was William Willet, a London builder who published a pamphlet with that title in 1907 and who succeeded in having his proposals debated in the House of Commons. But it was in wartime Germany and Austria-Hungary that daylight savings made its first appearance. Unfortunately, Bartky’s account is too brief to reconstruct the full context of its introduction.

Despite this limitation—as well as the limitation of Bartky’s focus on professional and technical groups, which shortchanges the social dimensions of time unification—this book will play an important role in future studies of time consciousness during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It extends Bartky’s earlier study of the development of a national consciousness for time in the United States, Selling the True Time (Stanford, 2000), and is especially valuable for indicating how diverse forms of internationalism played into disciplinary debates and bureaucratic implementation of time uniformity in the major Western nations.