In the movie Forrest Gump, the title character had a habit of appearing during pivotal moments in American history during the latter-half of the 20th century.
What if I told you that Canada had a real person with that same habit?
The day they drove the last spike to complete the trans-continental railway in 1885.
He was there.
When Montreal’s Parliament Building burned down in 1849?
He was in the building.
The creation of Canada’s first stamp in 1851?
He did that.
Connecting Canada and New Zealand through undersea telegraph cables in 1902?
That was his idea.
Creating the 24-hour clock, time zones and the prime meridian in the 1880s?
Ya…he did that too.
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx and today I’m sharing the story of one of the most important Canadians of the 19th century…Sir Sandford Fleming!
Sir Sandford Fleming was born into a world that was disconnected.
Written correspondence took days to reach nearby communities, travel was slow and uncomfortable and knowing the exact time was a guessing game.
But it was all about to change, and Fleming was a big part of that development.
And his story begins on Jan. 7, 1827, in Kilcaldy, Scotland, just to the north of Edinburgh on the east coast of Scotland.
At the time of his birth, the world was already in flux.
Two years before he was born in 1825, George Stephenson opened the first public steam railway in the world between Stockton and Darlington in England.
By the time Fleming was 14 in 1841, the railroad had taken over in England as a mode of transportation. The 1840s was the biggest decade for railway growth in the UK as a complete rail network was laid down, connecting most towns and villages on the island.
As a young man, Fleming saw railways appearing across the land and it had a major impact on him. The railroad was the future, and he wanted to be part of it.
At 14 years old, he apprenticed as a surveyor to learn how to map out future railroad lines.
After four years, his apprenticeship was coming to an end and there was one problem.
The United Kingdom was small and was already filling up with railway lines so to break new ground, Sandford had to look elsewhere.
Luckily, there was a place just starting its own railroad journey, Canada.
On April 24, 1845, Fleming left Scotland with his brother David and cousin Henry.
They were on their way to Canada on the steamer Brilliant and their journey across the ocean was difficult and stormy.
They arrived in Peterborough 55 days after leaving Scotland and decided that was where they would call home.
Fleming could not have arrived at a better time.
Canada was just taking its first steps toward the railroad age.
The first Canadian railway, the Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad, opened outside Montreal in 1836. Four years later, the Albion Railway was built in Nova Scotia.
Working towards his surveyor qualification in Canada, was a long process, and Fleming couldn’t sit still.
If he wasn’t studying, he was sketching or designing something. He even created an early version of inline skates.
To pass the time, he prepared maps of Peterborough, Hamilton, and Toronto.
His qualification was finally complete in 1849 and Fleming was ready.
when the Railway Guarantee Act was passed that same year.
This Act gave guaranteed bond returns on railways running over 120 kilometres which caused a boom in the railroad industry in eastern Canada and Fleming started to work as a junior surveyor.
But that wasn’t all he did.
On June 20, 1849, Fleming founded the Royal Canadian Institute with his friends architect Kivas Tully and civil engineer Hamilton Hartley Killaly.
Originally conceived as an organization for surveyors, architects, and civil engineers, it expanded into more scientific interests very soon after.
The organization still exists today as the Royal Canadian Institute for Science, and they have award-winning programming that provides a platform for scientists to connect with the public. By 1851, Fleming had designed the Threepenny Beaver stamp, Canada’s first postage stamp which features a beaver in an oval frame.
It was the first stamp to have an animal on it and not a monarch.
Fleming’s first employment in a senior surveying position came in 1852 when he was hired as an assistant engineer with the Northern Railway of Canada.
He worked directly under Fred Cumberland, the chief engineer.
Fleming and Cumberland got along at first, but as praise for Fleming increased among the public and company directors, Cumberland became jealous.
Around 1853t, the people of Saugeen, Canada West named a library after Fleming, which further angered Cumberland.
That same year, Fleming became reacquainted with a young woman named Jeannie Hall, whom he had known a decade earlier in Peterborough.
The two began courting and during one of their dates, Fleming showed up wearing a pink suit. That’s when he realized he was colour blind.
The incident obviously endeared Fleming to Jeannie, and the two continued their courtship. On New Year’s Eve 1853, Fleming wrote,
“An intimacy has grown up with Miss Hall of Peterborough. How it may terminate I do not know. An amiable well-bred woman.”
The couple was out one day for a sleigh ride when there was a crash and Fleming was thrown from the sleigh and injured.
When he came to, he saw Jeannie looking over him. During the week it took to recover from his injuries, he had some time to think about his future and as soon as he was back in Toronto, he wrote to Jeannie and proposed.
She wrote back and said yes.
The two were married in 1855.
Fleming’s personal life was thriving, but things were about to get complicated at work.
In 1855, Cumberland pushed for Fleming to be ousted from Northern Railway of Canada
Fleming fought back by telling the board of directors of Cumberland’s long absences from work, and his cost overruns.
In the battle between the two, Fleming won when Cumberland was fired, he became chief engineer.
But Cumberland wouldn’t quite be out of Fleming’s hair.
Over the next few years, he did his best Wormtongue impression and whispered poison about Fleming in the ears of the directors. He told them that Fleming was making too much money and spending too much on railroad construction.
Fleming was also not doing himself any favours. He seemed to lack a singular focus while working for the company.
In 1858, Fleming took time away from the railroad to co-design Toronto’s Palace of Industry.
The building was constructed in what is now Liberty Village in Toronto and was a smaller version of London’s Crystal Palace.
It measured 29 metres wide and 17 metres tall. The walls were made of cast iron and opaque glass.
It took 90 days to build, and the building had 47,000 square feet of space, and a capacity for 8,000 people. That’s where early versions of the Canadian National Exhibition were held until 1906, when it was destroyed by a fire.
So not only was he taking time away to work on another project Fleming was also stubbornly refusing to build cheaper wood bridges.
He advocated for iron bridges because they lasted longer and were much safer, but they were also very expensive.
Fleming was proven right as his bridges lasted decades longer than wood ones, but the directors were growing impatient because future cost savings didn’t matter, as much as the costs of the here and now.
The extra spending played right into Cumberland’s hands and in 1862 the board fired Fleming and Cumberland replaced him as chief engineer.
But Fleming wasn’t going to be down for long.
Canada was quickly moving towards Confederation in the 1860s, and Fleming saw the potential of linking the east and west coasts.
There was already talk of building a transcontinental railroad across the United States, and Fleming wanted the same thing.
In 1862, he put forward a proposal to build a line from the Atlantic to the Pacific and while it was not approved at the time, it would not be the last time Fleming would be involved in linking Canada by rail.
One year later in 1863, Fleming became the Chief Government Surveyor of Nova Scotia with the task to build a line between Truro and Pictou, a distance of 66 kilometres.
After completing the Nova Scotia railway in 1867, Fleming was appointed as the engineer-in-chief of the Intercolonial Railway.
The American Civil War had only ended two years earlier, and leaders in Nova Scotia wanted a way to avoid traveling through or close to the US when traveling to Canada.
Fleming put forward a report offering his best routes for the Intercolonial Railway, with emphasis on a route along Chaleur Bay because he thought it was the most economically viable and would connect Nova Scotia with Montreal, Toronto, and Kingston.
It was also well away from the American border.
The route was approved, and by 1872 the first section was up and running from Amherst to Truro, Nova Scotia.
Within two years, trains reached the St. Lawrence River.
The final section was opened in 1876 running for 1,100 kilometres, it was considered a technical marvel.
While building the Intercolonial Railway, the federal government asked Fleming if he would become the chief engineer of the new transcontinental railway.
British Columbia had joined Canada that same year on the promise of a railway from eastern Canada to the Pacific Coast.
Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald was eager to get the project moving, and he looked to Fleming, arguably the most famous engineer in Canada at this time, to survey the best route across the continent.
Fleming was hesitant to take on the project because he already had a significant workload with the Intercolonial Railway, but he had been advocating for a project like this for over a decade, so he took the job.
In 1872, Fleming left Eastern Canada to survey a route through the West to British Columbia.
Fleming was in his element trekking through marshes and forests, up mountains, and down valleys, it was all par for the course for him.
He had an unending energy that left many catching their breath just to keep up with him.
But the work was not easy.
The surveying group woke up at sunrise and walked until dark averaging 80 kilometres a day.
Along the way, they had to carry 100-link surveying chains to measure distances. They were heavy and had to be stretched out 27 times just to survey one mile.
They reached Winnipeg, then set out on the Carleton Trail, which went northwest through present-day Saskatchewan to Fort Carleton near Saskatoon.
Once at Fort Carleton, they continued to Fort Edmonton, and through the Yellowhead Pass.
Located in present-day Jasper National Park, the pass crosses the continental divide at a moderate 1,131 metres in elevation.
Fleming believed that the route for the transcontinental railway had to go through there and once they were through the group descended toward Kamloops and eventually to the Pacific Coast at New Westminster.
The journey took 103 days, traveling across 8,500 kilometres by railway, steamer, wagon, canoe, horses and on foot.
He returned and began working on his next project and the way we look at time has never been the same.
In one his previous travels through Ireland he had missed a train because a printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m. and each community set their own time.
Upon his return from the surveying trip in BC he wrote a memoir called “Terrestrial Time” in 1876.
In it, he proposed a single 24-hour clock for the world with 24 time zones, each an hour wide or 15 degrees in longitude.
Standard Time would be his most famous accomplishment, but he was still a few years away from succeeding with it.
In the meantime, he had a railroad to build.
After Sir John A. Macdonald lost the 1874 election, and work slowed down under Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie who did not see the transcontinental railway as a priority.
In British Columbia, there was growing resentment and there was a significant push to secede from Canada over the matter.
Macdonald came back into power as Prime Minister in 1878, and he didn’t want to waste any time getting the railroad built.
He was unhappy with the slow progress because of Fleming’s meticulous standards and was irritated by the amount of money being spent on surveying before a single track was laid down in the Canadian West.
Alexander Galt, the High Commissioner to the United Kingdom for Canada, wrote to Macdonald in 1878 stating,
“I have the conviction that you will neither obtain speedy nor economic construction under Fleming’s management.”
Galt urged Macdonald to remove Fleming from his position.
In response Macdonald created a Royal Commission to look at the railway operation.
The commission reported that the surveys were expensive due to the cost of the instruments Fleming used.
Between 1874 and 1879, 29 instrumental surveys were conducted, at a cost of $30,000 each.
During that same period, eight exploratory surveys were done costing $9,000 each.
Fleming was described by the commission as pennywise and pound foolish because he would survey a route, but then believed he could find a better and cheaper route elsewhere.
When no better route was found, he went back to his original route, wasting a lot of time and money.
Another example came in 1874 when the price of steel was very low.
Hoping to capitalize, Fleming bought far more steel than he needed but the price continued to fall, costing the public $2 million in lost savings.
When the Royal Commission released its report, blame was put mostly on Fleming.
In June 1880, he was dismissed from his position with a $30,000 payoff.
Soon after Fleming was removed from his position, the government decided to build the railroad through the Kicking Horse Pass in present-day southern Alberta, instead of Yellowhead Pass that Fleming recommended.
It was a baffling decision then, as much as it is now because the Kicking Horse Pass includes The Big Hill, which has a gradient of 4.5 per cent which was twice the percentage normally allowed for a downhill track.
It was the steepest stretch of any main-line railroad in North America and made it dangerous which was seen almost immediately when the first construction train to go over the pass hit the descent into British Columbia.
It ran off the hill and fell into the Kicking Horse River, killing three people.
The Yellowhead Pass has a lower elevation with a more gradual climb and descent making it safer.
By building the railroad through the southern portion of the Canadian Prairies, all railroads to the north eventually had to connect into the CPR line in the south.
This meant more profit from freight and passengers, looking to travel elsewhere in Canada.
It also ensured any traffic from the United States hit the CPR line first before any other branch line.
Which meant business interests overruled common sense.
[BEAT]
In 1880, the same year Fleming was relieved of his position with the CPR, he was offered the chancellorship of Queen’s University a position he held for the next 35 years.
In his first speech at the university, Fleming advocated for science education, something he had been passionate about since he founded the Royal Canadian Institute in 1849.
Since he was no longer overseeing the building of the transcontinental railroad, Fleming turned his attention to his pet project …. Standard Time.
In 1881, he took his idea to the Geographical Congress, and two years later presented it to the Geodetic Association.
Three years later, he spoke about Standard Time at the 1884 International Meridian Conference.
His idea was gaining steam as the world became more interconnected which brought him back to the railroad.
Because Fleming wasn’t quite done with that yet.
The government may have taken Fleming out of the transcontinental railroad, but he was not about to be shut out of the history- making venture.
Almost as soon as he was ousted from being chief engineer for the railway, Fleming bought up shares in the Hudson’s Bay Company.
In 1870, the former Hudson’s Bay Company territory of Rupert’s Land was transferred to the Canadian government.
As part of the agreement, the company held many large tracts of the best land which the new railroad syndicate, the Canadian Pacific Railway, was building through, making the Hudson’s Bay Company a powerful partner in the construction of the transcontinental railway.
With Fleming’s large amount of stock in the Hudson’s Bay Company, Donald Smith, a major financier of the CPR, told him to start buying syndicate stock.
Fleming did, and before long he was sitting as a director of the CPR and became close with George Stephen, the president.
He asked Fleming to meet Major Albert Rogers in British Columbia at the recently surveyed Rogers Pass, located in the Selkirk Mountain.
Stephen wanted Fleming’s opinion on the pass and its viability for the railroad.
This was the second pass that the railroad would journey through on its way to the Pacific Coast.
Now in his 50s, Fleming got ready for one last trip into the wilderness.
On this voyage, Fleming had his first introduction to the Kicking Horse Pass.
To make his way down the pass, he walked on a mountain edge that was 25 to 30 centimetres wide in some places, with a 244-metre drop down to the river.
To make things more difficult, there was nothing to hang onto.
Fleming wrote,
“To look down gives one an uncomfortable dizziness to make the head swim and the view unsteady, even with men of tried nerve. I do not think that I can ever forget that terrible walk. It was the greatest trial I ever experienced.”
Fleming survived that harrowing journey through the Kicking Horse Pass and made it to the Rogers Pass where he met Major Rogers where they shared a box of cigars at the summit.
As they stood, the two men created the Alpine Club of Canada, with Fleming as the first president.
A toast was made to celebrate and although this Alpine Club didn’t last long, it inspired the creation of the current Alpine Club of Canada.
Formed in 1906 the club has promoted mountaineering, fostered a sense of adventure, and advocated for the protection of the alpine environment for over a century.
Meanwhile, completion of the transcontinental railway was well on its way.
Over two decades from when Fleming first advocated for it, and a decade and a half from his first survey his dream came true.
On Nov. 7, 1885, at Craigellachie, British Columbia, a group of officials gathered to celebrate, and Fleming was on hand to watch as Donald Smith, the CPR financier, hammer in The Last Spike.
Feeling a sense of history, Fleming wore his best suit while others at the ceremony wore simple travel clothes.
In the photo of The Last Spike, Fleming is easy to spot as he stands directly behind Donald Smith who is hammering in the spike, wearing a large top hat and sporting a big white beard.
Fleming said of the day.
“It seemed as if the act now performed had worked a spell on all present. Each one appeared absorbed in his own reflections.”
The railroad was done, Standard Time was being adopted worldwide, what was next for the man who couldn’t sit still?
connecting the entire British Empire through the telegraph no less
In 1866, a telegraph link between Ireland and Newfoundland was completed.
Four years later, a link between Suez, the seaport city in north-eastern Egypt, and Bombay was finished, followed soon after by a link to Australia in 1871.
New Zealand was hooked up to the British Empire telegraph family in 1876.
Three years later Fleming began to advocate for a line to be built across the Pacific.
To complete what was called the All-Red Line, named for the red colour of the British Empire on 19th century maps, a telegraph connection was needed from Canada to New Zealand.
Fleming’s recommendation was supported at the First Colonial Conference in 1887, and detailed plans were drawn up at in 1894.
As a member of the Pacific Cable Committee, Fleming was front and centre in the efforts and spoke.
“The importance of the subject of the projected system of Pan-Britannic cables and telegraphs, girdling the globe, and all under state control. A vital subject fraught with momentous possibilities.”
In 1902, the Colonia, with 8,000 tonnes of telegraph cable on board, ran a line from British Columbia, across the Pacific Ocean.
The All-Red Line was completed on Oct. 31, 1902.
By now Fleming had been knighted by Queen Victoria and had accomplished a great deal. The man who couldn’t stand still had to slow down… kind of
He focused on his work as Chancellor of Queen’s University and wrote two books on electoral reform and proportional representation.
Near the end of his life, he reflected on the impact he had on his adopted country.
He said,
“How grateful I am for my birth into this marvellous world and how anxious I have been to justify it. It has been my great fortune to have my lot cast in this goodly land, and to have been associated with its education and material prosperity. To strive for the advancement of Canada.”
Fleming died on July 22, 1915, in Halifax.
Sir George Foster, a Member of Parliament who was serving as acting Prime Minister while Sir Robert Borden was away, said,
“The death of Sir Sandford Fleming deprives Canada of one more of its outstanding men.”
The Vancouver Daily World wrote,
“If he had accomplished nothing else, Sir Sandford Fleming, whose death occurred today at Halifax, would have taken an honored place amongst the builders of the British Empire for his work in the establishment of the Pacific Cable.”
Sir Andrew Macphail, a close friend said,
“He was the greatest man who ever concerned himself with engineering. His hands were clean, his eye was single, his heart was pure.”
Many places bear his name including Fleming, Saskatchewan, the Sandford Range, which includes Mount Sir Sandford. There is also Sandford Island and Fleming Island in British Columbia.
But his biggest legacy came to fruition by 1929, when nearly every major country on the planet had adopted time zones.
And before I leave you, I have to tell you about another Fleming brush with history, and it happened soon after his arrival to Canada.
[TRANSITION]
You might remember from an early 2024 episode of this podcast that on April 25, 1849, Montrealers were angry over the Rebellion Losses Bill.
They took their frustration out on the Parliament Building which was housed in the city and lit it on fire.
As the building burned, a large, beautiful portrait of Queen Victoria was in danger of being lost forever.
Fleming happened to be in the city, and like so many other times in his life, he just happened to bear witness to history happening in front of him.
Not content being a bystander to the destruction, Fleming and three others ran into the inferno, to rescue the painting of the monarch and get it to safety.
That painting now hangs in the foyer of the Senate of Canada.
[OUTRO]
