A month is scarce a building block of measurement . It can start up on any day of the workweek and last anywhere from 28 to 31 days . Sometimes a calendar month is four hebdomad long , sometimes five , sometimes six . You have to buy a new calendar with new dates every single year . It ’s a strange aim .
The calendar that the globe habituate right now is mostly a compounding of the Roman lunar calendar and the Egyptian solar calendar , a intersection of the love life affair between Caesar and Cleopatra . She was 21 and he was 52 , and when they got together , they did what lovers do : talk about the true nature of the earth ’s rotation .
The Egyptians had already discovered that the year is around 365 days long because of the Nile river . Egyptians had “ Nilometers , ” construction that went into the Nile that could predict the seasons , thanks to the Nile ’s tendency to oversupply to the same superlative at virtually the same twenty-four hour period every twelvemonth .
[ A Nilometer on Rhoda Island , Cairo . Credit : Baldiri ]
The Egyptians also figure out that the year is n’t always incisively 365 solar day , so they add an extra daylight every four years , just to make certain the calendar year equalize up with the seasons . In other words , they formulate the leap year .
This was all fantastic news to Caesar , because he had a touch sensation that the Roman Catholic calendar was n’t quite right . At that time , the Roman calendar year , which was ground on the phases of the Moon , was only 354 day long .
[ A Roman calendar before the Julian reform ]
The Julian calendar , which added the eleven missing days and put a leap twenty-four hour period in February , was instituted throughout the Romanic empire . Still , the Julian calendar was about 11 minutes and 14 secondment off each twelvemonth . These minutes added up to lost solar day and then an total lose calendar week .
By 1582 , Pope Gregory at last realized that everyone was worship all the holy years on the wrong dates from what they earlier were . He made a few readjustment to realign the year with the seasons ( including losing ten days ) , and created the Gregorian calendar , which is what ’s on your wall or your phone .
[ Courtesy of the George Eastman House ]
Now we basically live with the Gregorian calendar and do n’t query it . However , throughout history there have been a number of attempts to redesign the calendar .
One calendar re - design came after the French Revolution ; revolutionaries decreed the first year of the revolution was the year 1 , and they made the week ten days long . This calendar endured for more than a 10 , hold out until Napoleon crowned himself emperor .
In 1849 , another Frenchman , August Comte , created the so - calledPositivist calendar , which reorganise the month and rename them after great men of story ( Moses , Homer , Aristotle , etc . ) .
The positivistic calendar did n’t take off . But there was another radical endeavour at calendar reform that did .
Moses B. Cotsworth work the book books for the British railway , and the wonky , weirdly - divided Gregorian Calendar was make his problem difficult . In 1902 , Cotsworth gift a design for a calendar of 13 month where every month was on the nose 28 day . No more , no less . Four sodding hebdomad .
This meant the dates were all standardized as well . disregarding of the calendar month , the 5th was a Thursday . The 1st was always a Sunday . The 10th was always a Tuesday . There would be a Friday the 13th every single month — clearly , rational railway man were not superstitious .
All the month names would stay the same and an additional 28 - daytime month would fall between June and July . This extra calendar month would be name “ Sol , ” stand for the month when the summer solstice occurs . Leap Day would be add together to the ending of Sol , not February , so every four years , Sol would have 29 day .
[ good manners of theInternational Institute of Social History ]
13 months of 28 daytime make for 364 day in a year . To make it 365 , Cotsworth added a Modern holiday after December 28—”Year Day , ” a floating day , not part of any month . It would be a planetary sabbath .
away from year day , all other vacations would be moved to a Monday . All holidays would be three Clarence Shepard Day Jr. weekends .
Cotsworth tour the United States afford talks about his calendar ’s unnumerable welfare , but he could n’t find many takers . Though he did attract the interest of one of the wealthiest and most successful humanity of that metre : George Eastman , the founder of Kodak .
Eastman took it upon himself to promote Cotsworth ’s calendar design . He start a calendar league home office in Rochester , in Kodak ’s office . There they write and printed dissimilar aeronaut to pass on out to local businesses and actually convinced a few local business to switch to a 13 calendar month calendar . Including , of grade , Mr. Eastman ’s own fellowship , Kodak .
[ Courtesy of George Eastman House ]
The Eastman Kodak party adopt the 13 month calendar in 1924 and they continued to use it until 1989 . The 13 calendar month calendar was in use for 65 years .
However , within Kodak , Eastman could n’t fully bring the 13 calendar month calendar in its truest form . Kodak employees did n’t observe “ Sol ” or “ Year Day ” or alter every vacation to a Monday . They used it like how some bankers work in quarters or some schools function in semesters- Kodak ’s internal schedule was organized into 13 “ periods ” , labeled point 1 to period 13 . They used the 13 month calendar as an organizational tool for planning pecuniary resource and production docket , but employees still lived their animation on the Gregorian calendar .
George Eastman jazz that if he wanted to genuinely standardise the calendar , Kodak could n’t do it alone . He would have to convert the rest of the domain to make the switch . Eastman and Cotsworth presented the calendar to various committees in the U.S. Congress , and calendar reform became an actual issue of debate for the League of Nations , the forerunner to the U.N. At one point The League of Nations was considering 185 unlike calendar redesigns , and Cotsworth and Eastman ’s proposition was one of a few finalists .
Even after Eastman passed aside in 1932 , the League of Nations continue discussing calendar redesign , but they could n’t hail to a consensus . And then , Hitler and World War II made the project of redesign the calendar thoroughly unimportant . And then , the League of Nations folded .
We have n’t really conceive calendar reform since . But there ’s no reason we ca n’t take our holiday in Sol and fete Year Day .
Producer Avery Trufelman spoke with David Ewing Duncan , source ofCalendar ; Mark Byrnes , whowrote about the 13 month calendar forCityLab ; Kathy Connor ofGeorge Eastman House;and longtime Kodak employee John Cirocco and Robert Shanebrook ( who is also the writer ofMaking Kodak Film ) .
This posthas been republished with permission fromRoman Mars . It was originally publish on99 % Invisible ’s web log , which company each podcast .
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