How the Quest for the Perfect Calendar Accidentally Created February 30

A year is almost exactly 365 day … almost , but not quite . For millennia , people have tried to make calendars that account for that “ not quite ” fleck . It ’s why we have leap days and why , just once , there was a February 30 .

It ’s only comparatively recently – say , the last 2,500 years or so – that people seemed to care all that much about the yr . To be sure , people were cognizant of seasons and how temperatures and weather patterns seemed to cycle through and repeat every few hundred day or so . But these were practical matters , more tie in to agriculture and the harvest , rather than a matter that necessitate precise measurement . The knowledge that a twelvemonth lasts roughly 365 days is quite ancient and severally happen upon countless clock time throughout the world , but this knowledge did n’t inform the creation of the first calendar .

That fell to another , far more easy follow physical phenomenon : the phase angle of the Moon . The clock time between two full lunation is on median just over 29.5 days , stand for it was well-heeled to build a lunar calendar in which the months – a discussion that of course is derived from “ Moon ” – alternate between 29 and 30 day . Adding twelve of these alternating months together gives a year of 354 days , which is n’t a bad approximation of the length of a twelvemonth , all things considered .

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Most early calendars prioritized the cycles of the Moon over the length of the twelvemonth , with years being define so that they had a whole number of months . This means that a leaping month has to be added every two or three years to keep the twelve lunar month roughly in sync with their respective times of the twelvemonth .

A 5th 100 BCE astronomer get it on as Meton of Athens is credit with discovering the Metonic Cycle , which note that 19 solar years and 235 lunar calendar month are almost on the dot adequate , with only about two hour difference between them . This signify that there need to be seven leap months every 19 years to keep the lunar and solar calendars in harmony , an insight that makes long - term calendar - making a breeze . This fact was known to the Greeks , Babylonians , and Chinese , among other ancient civilization .

Our current Gregorian calendar is the replacement of the early Julian calendar , which in turn trace its extraction back to a calendar that was organise sometime during Rome ’s semi - legendary get-go . 2,700 or so years later , it ’s out of the question to know on the nose what happened – particularly when the credit for the original papist calendar is assign to the city ’s mythical founder Romulus – but we can say that the earliest Romans in all probability imported a true lunar calendar from the Greeks , which at some power point they convert to a loose solar calendar .

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I say “ informal ” because while this newfangled calendar had 365 day and its 30 - day and 31 - day months no longer accurately tracked the phases of the Moon , the Romans clear were n’t too bothered about too exact timekeeping . For one thing , there were only ten calendar month , which correspond to the modern March through December and amount 304 days of the year .

This , incidentally , is why the 9th through twelfth calendar month have names – September , October , November , December – that gain from the Romance words for seven through ten . Those once were their positions in the Roman calendar . The goal of the year between the terminal month December and first month March belonged to no specific calendar month . This might seem like horribly shoddy timekeeping , but the other Romans were primarily concerned with hard-nosed questions of the harvest . The wintry period between December and March did n’t divisor into the harvest , so what was the compass point of set apart specific months to describe them ?

Again , this is all shrouded in fable and custom , but the write up is that Numa Pompilius , the likely mythologic 2d king of Rome , reformed the calendar by adding January and February to the beginning of the year and attempt to switch things back to a lunar calendar . Complicating matters was the R.C. opinion that unpaired numbers were lucky , so Numa made eight month last 29 days and four others be 31 mean solar day longs for a total of 356 day .

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But , of course , that was an even number , rather defeating the distributor point of the whole odd - haunt exercise , so one month was made even and , to minimize the bad fortune , shorter than all the others . And if you ’re going to pick a unretentive , unluckiest month , I think everyone in the northern hemisphere can agree that there is no more perfect candidate for that dubious pureness than February . append a leap month of 27 days and shortening February for an extra - long year of 377 or 378 days every so often kept Numa ’s calendar on track with the solar year .

While this system may seem hopelessly chaotic and unwieldy , Numa ’s calendar worked well enough for hundreds of years , only breaking down doubly . The first instance come around 191 BCE , manifestly due to the topsy-turvydom wrought by the Punic full general Hannibal in the Second Punic War . The second breakdown occurred in the waning years of the Roman Republic , as the topic of when to add a leap month – more generally be intimate as intercalation – became a charge political issue .

It is n’t concentrated to see why . The commonwealth was regularize by a pair of consuls who both served for a terminal figure of one year . But depending on how it was defined , a twelvemonth could be either 355 , 377 , or 378 days , which meant certain consul would get to hold powerfulness for importantly long than their predecessors and heir . The decision to lengthen the twelvemonth fell to the pontifex maximums , a post that had lead off as the high priest of the Romanist religion but had since acquire into a potent political post coveted by the elite group . As Julius Caesar and his political rival chicane for control , the conclusion to add leap months stopped being about keeping the calendar aligned with the yr and started being almost exclusively about sticking it to one ’s political opposition .

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By the time Julius Caesar had acquire his title of respect of “ dictator in sempiternity ” in 46 BCE , the calendar was gravely out of alignment and nobody was really certain what day it was anymore . Caesar ’s metre in Egypt had brought him into contact with the scholars of Alexandria , who informed him that some centuries prior a Greek scholar – either Cleostratus in the 5th century or Eudoxus of Cnidus in the fourth , we ’re not certain which – had fix the true duration of the year was just about 365.25 days long . The historians Plutarch and Pliny the Elder , both writing about a one C afterward , say that upon his return to Rome Caesar enlisted the aid of the Mediterranean world ’s greatest philosophers and mathematicians to follow through a new calendar , with the Alexandrian stargazer Sosigenes getting the main credit for the new calendar .

The event of all this was something very close to the calendar we utilise today , as two day were bring to January , Sextilis – later rename August by Caesar ’s heir , who not coincidentally was named Augustus – and December to play them up to 31 days , and a single day was added to April , June , September , and November to get them to 30 . It should be steer out that the most logical affair to do would probably have been to have seven 30 - day months and five 31 - day calendar month to get to 365 , but for reasons that are in all probability lost to chronicle Caesar decide to keep February just 28 day long , giving it the lowly solace of a leap day every four years to keep the calendar in line with the year .

There ’s a legend that Augustus cabbage a day from February to make his month as long as Caesar ’s month July , but it ’s just that – a caption , and an easy debunk one at that . Perhaps , just like Numa ( or whoever really came up with the original Roman calendar ) the Lord of the Julian calendars merely disliked February and wanted the wintry cold over with as quickly as potential . Whatever the specific motivations , the new calendar was in spot and went into effect in 45 BCE , with Caesar push to sum three leap months to 46 BCE – making the twelvemonth an insane 445 daylight long – to bring the calendar back into alignment with the existent solar year .

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As I said before , Caesar had been differentiate that the year was almost 365.25 days long . The difference is little enough that add a bounce day every four year seems like a perfectly decent approximation , and the disagreement is n’t the kind of affair well comment over the length of a human lifetime . Certainly , Caesar ’s role of February 29 in his calendar represented a huge rise over his inspiration for a true solar calendar , that used by the Egyptians , which only used just 365 sidereal day and made no effort to chastise this error , resulting in what became know as the “ wandering calendar . ”

But the problem is that the solar class is actually 365.24219 Clarence Day , or 11 minutes and 14.784 second short of the year as specify by the Julian calendar . Caesar , or at least his learned team of advisor , should have been aware of this problem , considering the Greek polymath Hipparchus had number up with that measure back in the 2nd century BCE . But perhaps for ease of use – and the fact that this variance would n’t represent any existent problems for at least a thousand years – the makers of the Julian calendar dismiss this problem .

By the sixteenth 100 , the job could no longer be put to one side . The calendar had drifted well-nigh two weeks from the real solar year , mean anything to do with the lunar calendar was now dispiritedly out of sync . The specific impetus to reform the calendar issue forth from Pope Gregory XIII . Because the day of the month of the Easter celebration was tied to the timing of the outpouring equinox , the Catholic Church wanted to restore the calendar so that the equinoctial point again fell on its “ correct ” day of the month of March 21 . This date was really when the equinoctial point fell on 325 CE , the year of the Council of Nicaea that had first show when Easter would precipitate . By that clip , the equinox had already drifted three 24-hour interval from when Julius Caesar first promulgated his calendar , mean the equinox should arguably fall on March 24 … but then , one arbitrary date is really as skilful as another .

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For this new Gregorian calendar to work , two major changes were required . First , ten days would necessitate to be deleted in ordering to even out the drift . Italian uranologist and key contributor to the new calendar Aloysius Lilius argued this should be accomplished by skipping leap days for the next forty years , but his German colleague Christopher Clavius persuaded the Pope that it would be in effect to only skip ten 24-hour interval all in one go . That ’s just what the Church and a fistful of Catholic countries did on Thursday , October 5 , 1582 , which they immediately travel along with Friday , October 14 . Most other nation that later made the permutation also settle to just jump ahead to realign the calendar , such as when Great Britain and its American colonies jumped from September 2 to September 14 in 1752 .

The other crucial reform of the Gregorian calendar was to fix the number of leap years . We often say February 29 happens once every four age , but that elides over the accurate point our current calendar is meant to fix . The spring day actually occurs 97 meter every 400 years , as years divisible by 100 but not 400 ( so 1900 and 2100 , but not 2000 ) are no longer leap years . That efficaciously makes the Gregorian year 365.2425 days long , which entail the calendar wo n’t lose a Clarence Shepard Day Jr. for roughly 5,000 years .

The 19th century astronomer John Herschel actually proposed a way to improve even that grade of precision by skipping the leap day on years divisible by 4000 – it was n’t accept , but obviously there ’s still plenty of meter to implement his theme . Still , on timescales of multiple thousands of years , it ’s not deserving worry about a Clarence Shepard Day Jr. here or there , as the very gradual deceleration of the Earth ’s revolution is going to throw off the calendar anyway .

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So then , that ’s passably much everything you require to bang about February 29 . But what about February 30 ? The date is n’t whole unknown , at least not in sure technical expanse that apply unnaturally standardized calendar of twelve 30 - day months . But that ’s hardly the same matter as an actual real , historical date of February 30 . Well , that has happened – but only once .

To be sure , some try at calendar reform danced around the estimate of lengthen February . The French rotatory calendar I talked about inthe late denary sentence postinvolved received months of thirty days each , but these were all new months with no specific data link to the traditional twelve . The Soviet Union roleplay around with five - day and six - mean solar day week in its early planning calendar , which has led to the estimation that they constitute standard 30 - day month , but that is n’t true . Their attempts at standardise the workweek were simply overlaid onto the traditional Gregorian calendar , so February remained unchanged .

https://gizmodo.com/the-short-strange-history-of-decimal-time-5886129

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That just leaves the Swedes . In 1700 , the Swedish Empire – whose soil were principally composed of modern Sweden and Finland – decided it was clock time to join much of the rest of Europe by ditching the quondam Julian calendar for the Gregorian . However , unlike pretty much everyone else , they made the decision to phase in the novel calendar gradually by skipping leap days for the next 40 years instead of jumping eleven days in one go . What happen next illustrate just why Pope Gregory had the right idea when he choose the latter course 118 years prior .

Things started well enough with 1700 , which overleap February 29 . But that very same month , the Swedish Empire entered into one of the most devastating conflict in its history with the outbreak of the Great Northern War . For the next 21 years , Sweden was in for the battle of its life-time against a sinewy coalition moderate by Russia . In the thick of this carnage and bloodshed , the Empire clearly forgot about piddle away matter like fixing the calendar , and both 1704 and 1708 passed without anyone remembering these were n’t supposed to be leap years .

At this head , Sweden was one mean solar day ahead of the Julian calendar and 10 day behind the Gregorian , which was whole useless in full term of actually hard-nosed timekeeping . In the midst of warfare , wholesale calendar reform would have to wait , and so the rutabaga plant follow up with a stopgap solution to get themselves back on the Julian calendar . 1712 would sport not one but two bounce day , ready up for the one skipped in 1700 . So , in Sweden and Finland in 1712 , for what is most potential the only time in February ’s more than 2,500 years of existence , there was a February 30 .

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It ’s not well-situated to get really substantial parturition charge per unit data for Sweden in the early 1700s – believe me , I ’ve tried – and it ’s even harder for Finland . But my hypothesis would be that there were probably between 100 and 200 infant carry in Sweden and Finland on February 30 , 1712 . That ’s 100 to 200 people who , no matter how long they live , never got to lionize so much as their first natal day , which makes those born on February 29 look positively spoiled for birthdays by comparison . ( Oh , and , uh , happy natal day ! ) I enquire whether their parent even inconvenience oneself secernate them that February 30 was their factual birthday , perhaps prefer to just apply March 1 or February 29 instead to save everyone involved a lot of unneeded confusion .

For their part , Sweden at last made it to the Gregorian calendar in 1753 . Once again , February got the shaft , as its last eleven days were deleted so that the Swedes could rise right to March and its promise of spring , renewal , and exact timekeeping . But I say that on this Leap Day , let ’s spare a quick thought for what history has demonstrated again and again is everyone ’s least favorite month and remember that , for one brief day in one corner of Europe , February got to be a proper calendar month just like all the others .

“ Introduction to month ”

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