Sir Sandford Fleming invented Universal Standard Time, which was adopted worldwide in 1885.

As a Scottish engineer born in Kircaldy and then a railway engineer in Canada, he planned, surveyed and built the railway line running from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean in the late nineteenth century. It was his work on the railway timetables that led Sir Sandford to the invention of Universal Standard Time.Through standard time,the earth was divided into 24 time zones,each an hour from the next and all a fixed number of hours from the time in Greenwich,England (Zero degrees longitude) With a dream of one day linking communications between all nations in the British Empire he saw this completed in 1902 when the last telegraph cable was laid across the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

Sir Sandford Fleming was a founding member of the Royal Canadian Institute and was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1897.