The Wild Man At The Center Of The World

Throughout the 1800s, time was a work-in-progress. For much of the century, people set their watches to local solar time, determining noon to be the moment when the sun was directly overhead and casting no shadows. In 1850, the Naval Observatory, then in Foggy Bottom, began setting time for ships and Navy yards by dropping a very visible "time ball" at noon Washington time, like the one that drops at midnight in Times Square to ring in the new year.

By the late 1860s, the railroads kept their own time, but you had to know which railroad to know the time: There were more than 80, and each kept time according to its headquarter city, regardless of where you might catch a particular train on its travels. It would be like having to set your departure schedule by whether you were flying Northwest (Minneapolis time) or Delta (Atlanta time). Time was getting complicated.

In 1870, a headmaster at a women's seminary in New York proposed that railroads adopt four time zones evenly spaced across the country, the first zone centered on Washington time. Later, as the telegraph became more common, Washington Mean Noon was telegraphed daily nationwide. The railroad companies adopted it as a standard for regional time zones, to synchronize train schedules and make business more efficient. In effect, Washington Mean Time carried weight for timekeeping anyplace in America that had a telegraph or kept railroad time. Washington's meridian also had sway in mapmaking and determined the borders of several western states, including Colorado and the Dakotas.

When Miller moved here, Washington Mean Time was the standard. Then, in November 1883, time changed. At the urging of the railroads, the Naval Observatory issued a bulletin announcing a new standard -- a subtraction of 8 minutes and 12.09 seconds, to better align with the Greenwich, England, meridian. It was enough to erase anyone's margin for catching a train -- and it caused a stir.

A Washington Post reporter went canvassing local jewelers and watchmakers one evening that month and found deep divisions on this matter of time. On Seventh Street NW, the Schmedtie brothers thought that most of their peers would accept the new standard. A shop owner on Ninth Street said he'd stick to the old time. One jeweler struck an awkward middle ground: He'd keep the new standard in his window but the old time on his reference timepiece. The clocks of the Baltimore and Potomac railroad would adopt the new time; the U.S. Post Office, Interior, War and Navy departments would stick to the old. Although the railroad companies' new standard was "unprecedented," The Post offered wry reassurance to anyone worried "that this shaking up of time standards may endanger the stability of the universe." Officials at the Observatory joined in, insisting tongue-in-cheek that the sun, moon and stars would "roll along in their appointed courses in obedience to the law of gravitation, just the same as if no railroads had ever been invented."

The next step in standardizing time was to establish an international zero meridian -- an invisible north-to-south line from pole to pole -- that would serve as a global reference point. Within a year, delegates from 25 nations would gather in Washington to hash out the location. Greenwich and Washington (its meridian then determined by the Naval Observatory to be in Foggy Bottom, not on Jefferson's line) each had its backers to become the globe's Zero Hour. Most of the world's sailors used the Greenwich meridian for navigation; surveyors and astronomers used the Washington meridian for their maps and charts.

The Washington meridian was considered during the 1884 International Meridian Conference, notes Geoff Chester, public affairs officer at the Naval Observatory, "because we had a better idea of what our meridian was, in terms of the physical location." The observatory's then-location in Foggy Bottom had been set using two instruments simultaneously, arguably for greater precision. Greenwich had been measured once.

"Having a meridian in a particular country was something of a political football," Chester says. The French argued for Paris and strongly resisted a world clock centered on their rival Britain. Another proposal would have placed the meridian in the middle of an ocean, like the international date line. But though Washington had a shot, Greenwich -- because of its role in navigation -- had the edge from the beginning.

ON HIS HILL, MILLER PAPERED HIS CABIN WALLS WITH NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS AND MANUSCRIPTS. Apparently oblivious to the meridian melee, he thought, read and tried to write. He traipsed around in a frock coat with a giant tasseled sombrero over his long blond hair, and kept decidedly above the political fray. "I sit up here in my fine cabin," he reportedly said, "while the President sits down there at the end of the street with his little cabinet," a play on words that made Miller's home sound larger than Chester Arthur's entire administration, the way "booklet" is a small book.

When the writer Eugene Field visited the poet one brisk March day in 1884, he found himself taking a long, uphill walk and then a left turn "under a group of rugged oaks a hundred feet back from the highway," according to The Post.

The walls were made of simply hewn logs with plaster between them. Inside, the few furnishings included some heavy chairs and a low pine table overflowing with papers. Miller's bed stood in the corner, a spectacle itself: Its corner posts were made of tree trunks still covered in bark and moss. Miller threw fur robes and animal skins on the bed -- no mattress or springs for him. In back stood a well and a small (and presumably vacant) servants' quarters.

The visitor soaked up the view out front: the lazy Potomac beyond the recently finished Washington Monument; the rooftops, avenues and statues; "the clear, blue sky and the sunshine." Miller gave Field a copy of his new book as a parting gift.