99% Invisible - 159- The Calendar

Episode Date: April 8, 2015

A month is hardly a unit of measurement. It can start on any day of the week and last anywhere from 28 to 31 days. Sometimes a month is four weeks long, sometimes five, sometimes six. You have to buy … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. 30 days have September, April, June and November. February has 28 alone. All the rest have 31. Except in Leapier, that's the time when February's days are 29. That doesn't even rhyme. Oh, the poem I grew up with was slightly different. Producer Avery Truffleman. 30 days, half September, April, June, and November, all the rest have 31, except for February, which has 28 days clear and 29 in each leap year. Okay, I think that rhymes actually worse. Both poems say the same thing, which is that months don't make any logical sense.

A month is hardly a unit of measurement. It can be anywhere from 28 to 31 days. Sometimes it's four weeks. Sometimes five. Sometimes six. You have to buy a new calendar with new dates every single year. It's a strange design. Well, the year that we now have, and basically consider

almost a writ of God, you know, somehow it's just indivisible. There it is. Actually, it's had an amazing history. That is David Ewing Duncan. And I am the author of Calendar. Humanities epic struggle to determine a true and accurate year. The calendar that the world really uses right now is mostly a sort of joining of the Roman calendar and Egyptian calendar. It's basically when Caesar and Cleopatra were kind of hanging out and doing their thing. Which is to say, when Roman Caesar and Egyptian Cleopatra were having a Torrid love affair. This was before Cleopatra got together with Mark Antony. She was 21 and Caesar was 52. But they got together and they did what lovers do.

Discussed the true nature of the Earth's rotation. And the Egyptians long before the Greeks came, actually discovered the true length of the year. 365 days. And the Egyptians knew about the length of the year because of the Nile River. They had something called a Nile meter. It was basically a series of steps that went into the Nile River. They had something called a Nileometer. It was basically a series of steps that went into the Nile.

The Nile actually flooded at the same height, virtually every year, on the same day. And they were just simply marked each year when it hit its height. But the Egyptians also figured out that the year isn't always exactly 365 days, so they added an extra day every four years, just to make sure that the calendar matched up with the seasons. In other words, they invented the leap year. And this was all fantastic news to Caesar, because he had a feeling that the Roman calendar wasn't quite right.

The Roman calendar year, at the time, was around 354 days long. Obviously, that's a few days short, right? 11 days about short from the actual solar year. And when you lose 11 days, year after year after year, the seasons start to drift. They're spring and the winter months, winter and the fall months. And those 11 days were missing

because the Roman calendar had always been based on moon cycles. Cleopatra inspired Caesar to switch to a calendar that would be consistent with the Earth's cycle around the Sun. When Caesar returned to Rome from his dalliance with Cleopatra, he introduced the leap year, which is called the Julian calendar. Julius Caesar also added back those 11 missing days. And the Julian calendar was instituted throughout the Roman Empire, which is to say,

throughout much of the world. But it was still a bit off. The Julian calendar wasn't entirely accurate itself. It was about 11 minutes, 14 seconds off each year. Eventually you had, you were losing days, and then there was a week, and by 1582, Pope Gregory the 13th had to wear a thought to say, okay, we are actually, we have an inaccurate calendar we're worshiping all of our holy days on the wrong day from what they originally were. And with a few small adjustments to realign the year with the seasons, we have the Gregorian calendar named after Pope Gregory.

And that's what's on your wall or your phone. We all use it, we don't think about it now. And for that reason, there has not been a huge momentum to try to change things. I mean, we basically live with it. But there are a lot of smart people out there, have been for centuries, that have come up with better calendars, and there are better calendars. One example of calendar redesign came after the French Revolution.

The French decreed the first year of the revolution was the year one, and they made the week 10 days long. This was actually instituted for over a decade. Then Napoleon put the Kabash on that when he became emperor. And later, another Frenchman created the so-called positivist calendar. The positivist calendar was created in 1849 by August Comte. He reorganized the months and renamed them after the great minds of history. Moses, Homer, Aristotle, Archimedes, Caesar, St. Paul. All the great white men of history.

Charles Meng, Dante, Gutenberg, Shakespeare. That's Mark Burns, by the way. My name is Mark Burns. I am the visual editor for Cedilab. That positivist calendar didn't really take off. It was mostly meant as an inspirational memorial to glorify great thinkers. And, you know, patriarchy. However, there was another radical attempt at calendar reform that actually kind of happened.

And Mark Burns wrote a piece about it for CityLab. I wrote The Death and Life of the Thirteen Month Calendar. This was a highly rational 13 month calendar meant to appeal not to romantics but to industrialists. Because the wonky, weirdly divided Gregorian calendar was difficult for accountants who had to track monthly numbers and for the people who had to make the trains run on time. And Moses B. Cotsworth was both of those people. trains run on time, and Moses B. Cotsworth was both of those people. Moses B. Cotsworth was an analytic sky mostly working in the railway industry. Cotsworth was a British railway man and he was all about efficiency.

The Gregorian calendar wasn't cutting it for him. So let's say there's a month where there's an extra Monday or there's a month where there's an extra Saturday that would throw off the numbers from month to month. And that kind of frustrated Cotsworth. So he created his 13 month calendar. In 1902, Cotsworth presented a design for a calendar of 13 months, where every month was exactly 28 days. No more, no less.

Four perfect weeks. And this meant the dates were all standardized as well. You'd always know that the fifth was a Thursday, no matter the month. The first was always a Sunday, the tenth was always a Tuesday. There'd be a Friday, the thirteenth, every single month. Rational railway men were not superstitious, clearly. All the month names would stay the same, and then that additional month, another 28 even days, would fall between June and July, and this additional month would be called Seoul.

S-O-L. Seoul, standing for the month where the summer solstice occurs. And the leap year day would be added at the end of Seoul, not February. So every four years Seoul would have 29 days. Alright, so 28 days times 13 months is 364 days in a year. That is one day less than the actual solar year of 365. So to make it 365, Cotsworth added a new holiday right before the new year. There's extra day at the end of the year, called Year Day.

And Year Day was just a floating day, not part of any particular month, and it would be a sort of global Sabbath. And aside from Year Day, all other vacations would be moved to a Monday. Holidays would always be practiced or observed on Mondays. You don't have to worry about certain months where everyone's out on a Wednesday, and maybe since they have Wednesday off, they want to schedule a Thursday and Friday off. None of that nonsense.

Holidays would all be three-day weekends. No Wednesdays off. Cotsworth pitched his perfect calendar around the United States, giving talks about its myriad benefits, but he couldn't find many takers. Except for one of the wealthiest and most successful businessmen of that time,

George Eastman. George Eastman, the founder of Kodak. Mr. Eastman had a lot of unique interests in addition to his company and his philanthropic work, but this I have to say is probably one of the weirdest interests that he had in pursuit. Kathy Connor is the curator of the George Eastman House and collection in Rochester, New York. When he had an interest in anything, he always put a decent amount of money into getting other people to buy into his ideas as well, and he did exactly that with the 13-month calendar.

Eastman basically took it upon himself to promote Cotsworth's calendar design, and he started a calendar league headquarters in Rochester Rochester in Codax office. He gave a little office to this calendar reform group and it was there that they published and printed some different flyers to hand out to local businesses. They actually convinced a few local businesses to switch to a 13 month calendar, including, of course, Mr. Eastman's own company. They adopted it at the Eastman Code Act Company in 1924, and they continued to use it until 1989, so they had a 65 years.

Let me just repeat that they used this calendar until 1989. Apparently employees found it useful. When I did sales reporting programs, I didn't have to worry about, well this is a 28-day month, this is a 31-day month, this is a 30-day month, I acclimated it very quickly. John Soraka worked at Kodak from 1986 to 1992, and he actually liked the calendar so much that he tried to bring it with him beyond Kodak. A couple of times I've actually tried getting companies that I've worked for to go and tried to bring it with him beyond Kodak. But like Moses' cutsworth in George Eastman before him, John Seraco just couldn't convince

other businesses to take it on. That said, even within Kodak, Eastman couldn't fully institute the 13-month calendar in its truest form. The calendar, as John knew it, was kind of a modified version. I only knew it as this is the financial calendar of the Eastman Kodak company. Kodak employees didn't observe soul or year-day or change every holiday to a Monday. It was like how some bankers work in quarters or some schools function in semesters. Kodak's internal schedule was organized into 13 periods. Just called period 1 to period 13.

Instead of saying that today was March 6, we would say that today is the third period day three. They used the 13-month calendar as an organizational tool for planning finances and production schedules. We programmed and we wrote and we designed applications to work within the code at 13 periods, but we still lived our life the way the normal Gregorian calendar was. Because, of course course the rest of the world was still on the Gregorian calendar. Renaming and reorganizing the days and holidays would have been a total drag. And this is basically the same reason why it would be so hard for the larger world to adopt a 13 month calendar.

The explanation for how July 4th at work is kind of like the perfect example of how complicated it would be to mentally adjust to this new calendar. That's journalist Mark Burns again. Okay, so on the 13-month calendar schedule, July 4th would have to be moved to a Monday, like all the holidays. So then… It would really be July 2nd. But when you add in Seoul and shuffle the dates around accordingly, that actual day on the solar calendar wouldn't fall in July anymore.

It would actually be Seoul 17, but that falls on a Tuesday. So again, you gotta make that a Monday, so it would end up as Seoul 16. So there's nothing as patriotic as celebrating Seoul 16. This is why the calendar and its truest most regulated form couldn't fully work at Kodak. I mean, you have to give your employees a vacation on July 4th, even if it's not on a Monday. So random holidays and off days persisted. George Eastman knew that if he wanted to standardize the calendar, Kodak couldn't do it alone. He would have to convince the rest of the world to make the switch.

He and Mr. Katzworth, they went to bat a few times in front of a lot of different committees at Congress and in our government to try to just explain the rationale. And this was taken completely seriously. Calendar reform became an actual issue of debate for the League of Nations. The League of Nations has in the precursor to the UN. There are 185 plans before the League of Nations to look at for calendar reform. And Cotsworth and Eastman's proposal

was one of the few finalists. Even after George Eastman passed away in 1932, the League of Nations continued discussing calendar redesign. Basically, League of Nations couldn't come to a consensus, and then the rise of Hitler and World War II made it thoroughly unimportant to them, and then the League of Nations folded. Hitler ruins everything, and we just haven't really considered calendar reform since. Perhaps because, when designing time and the way people operate, you have to consider custom and culture. It has to be done entirely and completely, or not at all.

So who knows, perhaps if everyone decided to adopt it, a regimented calendar could really work better for, you know, finances and planning. But on the other hand, I think it's kind of fascinating that our year is not perfectly regimented. It's out of our control. Sometimes your birthday is on a Tuesday. Sometimes it's a Saturday. The Gregorian calendar is this organic instrument that ebbs and flows with the seasons

on the rotation of the Earth. I've got to have spent too much time in California. It's really a bizarre anomaly of history that this calendar that started with a season of Cleopatra that was reformed by a pope. It was really a Christian calendar. It's now the calendar of the world. And all we have to help us remember it is a stupid rhyme. That doesn't even rhyme.

By the way we talked to another long time Kodak employee for this story. Yes my name is Robert Sheenbrock. I was for Kodak for 35 years. Robert wrote a book about how Kodak film was made called Making Kodak Film. This manufacturing process used to be top secret, but Robert got insider access to Kodak's facilities. I spent 40 days photographing in the factory, like 165 photographs that show all the equipment and explains the process. This is like its own separate episode. Check it out, nerds. It's makingcodacfilm.com.

99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Avery Troubleman with Sam Greensppan, Katie Mingle, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of ArcSign, an architecture and interiors firm, where designing a new chicken waffles place in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. I'm so excited about the chicken waffles place. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook, all of us are on Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify, but to find out more about this story, including cool pictures and links and listen to all the episodes of 99% Invisible, you must go to 99pi.org. Radio Tapio.

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