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Have you
ever gone to bed one night and wondered just where the day went? Well could you
imagine waking up to discover that eleven days had vanished completely? That is
just what happened in 1752 when the entire inhabitants of Britain and America
went to bed on Wednesday 2 September, only to awake on Thursday 14 September.

 

However, it
wasn’t an epidemic of sleepy sickness or even a mass dose of laziness that kept
the entire populace in bed but merely the authorities attempting to synchronise
with the rest of the world by adopting the Gregorian calendar.

 

The Julian
calendar (named after Julius Caesar) had been in use since biblical times but
was finally phased out throughout Europe in the 1582 but it took the resolute
Brits and Americans another two hundred years to follow suit.

 

And if the
painter Hogarth is to be believed the populace didn’t take too kindly to it
either, with people taking to the street demanding the return of their missing
11 days and even reports of rioting.

 

Then why
change? That was what the British authorities had been saying for two hundred
years ever since Pope Gregory XIII had replaced the Julian calendar in Europe
two hundred years before.

 

However,
the reason for the original change was that the Julian calendar didn’t allow
for enough leap years (they were omitted in years divisible by 100 but not
divisible by 400 – what were the Romans thinking?) and the seasons were slowly
becoming out of sync with the calendar. The situation was now becoming even
more intolerable in Britain, playing havoc for farmers - who had no idea when
to plant their crops, finally the authorities were to switch over and fast
forward the whole country 11 days.

 

However
this synchronisation problem has always been with us. We have traditionally
tried to base our calendars around the movement of the Earth to allow us to predict
seasons and know when the summer and winter will fall. However, we may have
sorted out the leap years (caused by the fact the Earth takes 365 and a quarter
days to travel around the Sun) but trying to base a calendar around the
movement of the Earth will always lead to problems.

 

The
Gregorian calendar worked fine until the 1950’s when the atomic clock was
developed. The atomic clock worked so well - providing timing information
accurate to a second in several millions of years - that we soon realised that
our clocks were now far more accurate than the Earth itself.

 

The Earth
is actually slowing down in rotation and if nothing was done then eventually
noon would fall at night and vice-versa (albeit not for several millennia) but
don’t worry you are not about to wake up in the middle of next week. The
solution is the adding of leap seconds and 33 have been slotted into the end of
our years since the 1970’s.

 

The
decision to insert a second is usually taken six months before after careful
monitoring of the Earth’s rotation. A calendar based on the movement of the Earth
may seem less relevant today but with a Global Positioning System (GPS), a
global time-scale (Coordinated Universal Time) , and computers all synced
together around the world using NTP servers (Network Time Protocol) it is
imperative we can all tell the right time.

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Tags: british authorities, brits, crops, eleven days, epidemic, gregorian calendar, havoc, hogarth, hundred years, inhabitants, julian calendar, julius caesar, laziness, leap years, pope gregory xiii, populace, resolute, rest of the world, romans, sleepy sickness

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