Sir Sandford Fleming FRSC KCMG (January 7, 1827 – July 22, 1915) was a Scottish Canadian engineer and inventor.

[1] He designed Canada's first postage stamp, produced a great deal of work in the fields of land surveying and map making, engineered much of the Intercolonial Railway and the first several hundred kilometers of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and was a founding member of the Royal Society of Canada and founder of the Canadian Institute (a science organization in Toronto).

In 1851 he designed the Threepenny Beaver, the first Canadian postage stamp, for the Province of Canada (today's southern portions of Ontario and Quebec).

His work for them eventually gained him the position as Chief Engineer of the Northern Railway of Canada in 1855, where he advocated the construction of iron bridges instead of wood for safety reasons.

When he would not accept the tenders from contractors that he considered too high, he was asked to bid for the work himself and completed the line by 1867 with both savings for the government and profit for himself.

His insistence on building the bridges of iron and stone instead of wood was controversial at the time, but was soon vindicated by their resistance to fire.

[9] These sections were particularly costly due to the difficult terrain and included two bridges over the Miramichi River and six miles of approaches.

[10] By 1871, the strategy of a railway connection was being used to bring British Columbia into federation and Fleming was offered the chief engineer post on the Canadian Pacific Survey.

[8][12] It was the hardest blow of Fleming's life, though he obtained a promise of monopoly, later revoked, on his next project, a trans-pacific telegraph cable.

[14] After missing a train while travelling in Ireland because a printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m.,[15]: 8  in 1876 he wrote a memoir "Terrestrial Time" where he proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world, conceptually located at the centre of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian.

[18][19] Fleming's two papers were considered so important that in June 1879 the British Government forwarded copies to eighteen foreign countries and to various scientific bodies in England.

[26] Fleming authored the pamphlet "Time-Reckoning for the 20th Century",[27] published by the Smithsonian Institution in its annual report for 1886.

[31] When the railway privatization instituted by Tupper in 1880 forced him out of a job with government, he retired from the world of surveying, and took the position of Chancellor of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

Not content to leave well enough alone, he tirelessly advocated the construction of a submarine telegraph cable connecting all of the British Empire, the All Red Line, which was completed in 1902.

In 1910, this business was captured in a hostile take-over by stock manipulators acting under the name Canada Cement Company, an action which Fleming took as a personal blow.

He became a strong advocate of a telecommunications cable from Canada to Australia, which he believed would become a vital communications link of the British Empire.

[43][44] In 1883, while surveying the route of the Canadian Pacific Railway with George Monro Grant, he met Major A.

[46] In his later years he split his time between Ottawa at his house named "Winterholme" and Halifax where he owned a mansion known as "Blenheim Cottage", but often called "The Lodge" at the corner of Oxford Street and South Street overlooking the Northwest Arm[47] as well as a summer estate across the Arm called "The Dingle" which included the Sandford Fleming Cottage, a small rustic residence he built in 1886.