Outdoor Research

Sir Sandford (3 519 m / 11 545 ft)

The mountain was named after Sir Sandford Fleming, a railway engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Named after Sandford Fleming, perhaps the greatest railway engineer in Canadian history. Born on July 7 1827 in Scotland, he became one of the foremost railway engineers of his time, in charge of the initial survey for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Fleming also designed the first Canadian postage stamp, which was the first pictorial stamp issued anywhere in the world. Fleming's lasting fame however, results from his contribution to the development of Standard Time Zones. Before Fleming, every community across the world set its own time, based on high noon, and times between towns were somewhat undefined. Ottawa had a different time from Montreal, and Montreal from Quebec. With the advent of railways, more precise time was required to co-ordinate the life and death issues concerning train right of ways on single track railways. Fleming proposed a scheme to standardize the time within hour wide bands of space. This meant that 12:00 Vancouver time would be the same thing as 12:00 Kamloops time, regardless of the actual time of high noon. Prior to railways and telegraphs, there was no need to co-ordinate times that closely, because neither news nor people could travel fast enough to make any difference. Sandford Fleming died in Halifax in 1915.