Turning Point 1884

From our hyper-technological 21st-century viewpoint, it may be hard to believe it wasn’t always easy to know the time of day—or even where, exactly, we stood on the planet. But such an era wasn’t that long ago.

Starting in the 1840s, Dr. Charles Smallwood diligently recorded weather and astronomical observations from his home near Montreal. In 1863, the physician, by then an honorary McGill professor of meteorology, moved his pioneering weather forecasting efforts to a new stone tower beside McGill’s Arts Building. The aging Smallwood soon recruited his student C.H. McLeod to assist him with his studies. In 1874, one year after Smallwood’s death, the McGill Observatory was raised to the status of the nation’s “chief station,” telegraphing weather reports every three hours to the new Canadian Meteorological Service in Toronto.

Following his mentor’s weather methodology, McLeod began combining telegraph communications with astronomical observations, made using a seven-foot telescope, to calculate McGill’s longitude relative to the continental reference point, Harvard College. Using an 1892 follow-up reading relative to the zero meridian at Greenwich, England, McLeod revised the longitude figure for Harvard—and, as a result, more accurately positioned every city, town, hamlet and farm in North America.