Engineer and Inventor.

Born in Scotland, this civil engineer came to British North America in 1845, and built a career that made him nineteenth-century Canada's most notable railway surveyor and construction engineer.

He undertook the chief engineering role for some of Canada's earliest railway lines, including the Intercolonial Railway, which ran east from Québec City to St John NB and Halifax NS. His vision for an all-Canadian railway made him the obvious person to appoint as engineer of the project to build a railway from Montréal to the Pacific Ocean, a distance of more than 4,700 km.

Fleming directed much of the surveying of the Canadian West, both the Prairies and the Rocky Mountains. Fleming resigned from the project once it was turned over by the Canadian government to a private company in 1880 (the railway across Canada was completed on 7 November 1885).

Afterwards, he spent time on the inventions that made him famous outside Canada. These were his proposals for a worldwide system of keeping time, and the laying of a telecommunications cable across Canada and then around the world.

In the case of the first, Fleming was the first to advocate a standard, or mean, time, so that, anywhere in the world, time could be calculated as a variation of that mean time. This led to the standardization of the international time zones that we have today around much of the world, the People's Republic of China marking one of the few exceptions. A conference in 1884 in the city of Washington, USA, which Fleming did much to organize, adopted these proposals.

In the case of the second, Fleming's advocacy resulted in the successful laying of the Pacific Cable from Canada to Australia in 1902. In his early years, Fleming was also the designer of Canada's first postage stamp, the threepenny beaver, which appeared in 1851.