Pop History Moment: Sir Sandford Fleming Proposes Universal Standard Time

On this day in 1879 Sandford Fleming first proposed adoption of Universal Standard Time at a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute, which he'd helped to establish in Toronto in 1849. As the video clip shows, Fleming first conceived of time zones while surveying Canada's Intercolonial Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway, itself a mammoth undertaking; while Fleming's earlier efforts would change the face of the world's second-largest country, though, the proposal he rolled out now would literally remake the entire world...

Thanks to these Heritage Minutes, Canadian history not only takes its place as world history by gaining the kind of gloss that those who teach it have worked so hard to eliminate for so many years, an innovation the Pop Culture Institute wholeheartedly supports.
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