Today in Technology History
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September 3
Today is the 250th anniversary of a day that never happened.
We have written before about the calendar, an indispensable piece of technology that we all take for granted. Ancient civilizations developed calendars to bring predictability and regularity to agriculture. By the time of the Romans, the traditional calendar was so out of sync with the seasons that Julius Caesar instigated a major reform. But even that reform was flawed, and by the 1500s, the calendar was wrong by more than a week.
So in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII ordered another set of reforms, including the elimination of several days (to get the calendar back in step with reality) and a tweak of the leap day system (so the calendar wouldn't be so vagrant in the future).
Most of the Catholic world accepted the Gregorian calendar right away -- but since this reform took place well into the Reformation, some of the more Protestant countries resisted the change. Most notably, Great Britain refused to go along with Gregory's reform. This is understandable, since the relationship between Britain and the Catholic Church was rather icy in 1582: Gregory's predecessor in the Vatican had excommunicated England's Queen Elizabeth, and Gregory himself suggested that the queen should be assassinated and that anyone who murdered her deserved canonization. Naturally, for a long time the British wanted nothing to do with the pope's calendar.
Finally, Britain submitted to the Gregorian calendar system in 1752 (although they called it the "Reformed calendar," so as not to acknowledge its popish provenance). To correct the creeping calendrical error, eleven days were eliminated, so that September 2 was followed immediately by September 14. Thus September 3, 1752 was one of the days that never happened -- at least for Britain and her colonies.
Another part of the calendar reform was to start the new year in January instead of March, as was the custom. All these reforms have led some historians to dub 1752 a "year of confusion." To make things even more complicated, some people changed the date on which they celebrated their birthday so as to correspond with the "real" day on which they were born. George Washington, for instance, was born on February 11, 1731; when the calendar switched in 1752, he shifted his birthday to February 22, 1732.
Even though it took the English-speaking world 170 years to adopt the Gregorian calendar, there were other stragglers who came aboard even later. Russia and China, for instance, both adopted the Gregorian system only in the twentieth century.
Related links:
Click here to read about various calendar reforms, including the Gregorian reform.
This page summarizes the 1752 calendar change in Britain.
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