The Calendar

Roman Mars:
This is 99% invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
30 days hath September, April, June, and November. February has 28 alone. All the rest have 31, except in leap year. That’s the time when February’s days are 29. That doesn’t even rhyme.

Avery Trufelman:
Oh, the poem I grew up with was slightly different.

Roman Mars:
Producer Avery Trufelman.

Avery Trufelman:
30 days hath 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.

Roman Mars:
Both poems say the same thing, which is that months don’t make any logical sense.

Avery Trufelman:
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.

Roman Mars:
It’s a strange design.

David Ewing Duncan:
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 has had an amazing history.

Avery Trufelman:
That is David Ewing Duncan.

David Ewing Duncan:
And I am the author of ‘Calendar: Humanity’s 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 the Egyptian calendar. It’s basically when Caesar and Cleopatra were kind of hanging out and doing their thing.

Roman Mars:
Which is to say, when Roman Caesar and Egyptian Cleopatra were having a torrid love affair.

Avery Trufelman:
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: Discuss the true nature of the Earth’s rotation.

David Ewing Duncan:
And Egyptians, long before the Greeks came, actually discovered the true length of the year.

Roman Mars:
365 days.

Avery Trufelman:
And the Egyptians knew about the length of the year, because of the Nile River.

David Ewing Duncan:
They had something called a nilometer.

Roman Mars:
It was basically a series of steps that went into the Nile.

David Ewing Duncan:
The Nile actually flooded at the same height, virtually every year on the same day. They would just simply mark each year when it hit its height.

Roman Mars:
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.

Avery Trufelman:
And this was all fantastic news to Caesar because he had a feeling that the Roman calendar wasn’t quite right.

Roman Mars:
The Roman calendar year at the time was around 354 days long.

David Ewing Duncan:
Obviously, that’s a few days short, right? So 11 days, about, short, from the actual solar year.

Avery Trufelman:
And when you lose 11 days year after year after year after year, the seasons start to drift. There’s spring in the winter months, winter in the fall months.

Roman Mars:
And those 11 days were missing because the Roman calendar had always been based on moon cycles.

Avery Trufelman:
Cleopatra inspired Caesar to switch to a calendar that would be consistent with the Earth’s cycle around the sun.

David Ewing Duncan:
When Caesar returned to Rome from his dalliance with Cleopatra, he introduced the Leap Year, which is called the Julian Calendar.

Roman Mars:
Julius Caesar also added back those 11 missing days.

Avery Trufelman:
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.

David Ewing Duncan:
The Julian Calendar wasn’t entirely accurate itself. It was about 11 minutes, 14 seconds off each year. Eventually, we were losing days, and then there was a week, and by 1582, Pope Gregory the 13th had the wherewithal to say, “Okay. We have an inaccurate calendar. We’re worshiping all of our holy days on the wrong day from what they originally were.”

Avery Trufelman:
And with a few small adjustments to realign the year with the seasons, we have the Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory.

Roman Mars:
And that’s what’s on your wall, or your phone.

David Ewing Duncan:
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.

Avery Trufelman:
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.

Roman Mars:
This was actually instituted for over a decade, then Napoleon put the kibosh on that when he became emperor.

Avery Trufelman:
And later, another Frenchman created the so-called positivist calendar.

Mark Byrnes:
The positivist calendar was created in 1849 by Auguste Comte.

Roman Mars:
He reorganized the months and renamed them after the great minds of history.

Mark Byrnes:
Moses, Homer, Aristotle, Archimedes, Caesar, Saint Paul-

Avery Trufelman:
All the great white men of history.

Mark Byrnes:
Charlemagne, Dante, Gutenberg, Shakespeare.

Avery Trufelman:
That’s Mark Byrnes, by the way.

Mark Byrnes:
My name is Mark Byrnes. I am the Visual Editor for CityLab.

Avery Trufelman:
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.

Roman Mars:
And Mark Byrnes wrote a piece about it for CityLab.

Mark Byrnes:
I wrote ‘The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar.’

Roman Mars:
This was a highly rational 13-month calendar, meant to appeal not to romantics, but to industrialists.

Avery Trufelman:
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.

Mark Byrnes:
Moses B. Cotsworth was an analytics guy, mostly working in the railway industry.

Avery Trufelman:
Cotsworth was a British railwayman, and he was all about efficiency. The Gregorian calendar wasn’t cutting it for him.

Mark Byrnes:
So, let’s say there’s a month where there’s an extra Monday, or there’s a month with an extra Saturday. That would throw off the numbers from month to month. That kind of frustrated Cotsworth, so he created his 13-month calendar.

Roman Mars:
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.

Avery Trufelman:
And this meant that dates were all standardized, as well. You’d always know that the 5th was a Thursday, no matter the month. The 1st was always a Sunday. The 10th was always a Tuesday.

Mark Byrnes:
There’d be a Friday the 13th every single month.

Roman Mars:
Rational railwaymen were not superstitious, clearly.

Avery Trufelman:
All the month names would stay the same, and then that additional month, another 28 even days, would fall between June and July. This additional month would be called Sol.

Roman Mars:
S-O-L.

Mark Byrnes:
Sol, standing for the month where the summer solstice occurs.

Roman Mars:
And the leap year day would be added at the end of Sol, not February, so every four years, Sol would have 29 days.

Avery Trufelman:
All right. 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.

Mark Byrnes:
There’s an extra day at the end of the year, called Year Day.

Roman Mars:
And Year Day was just a floating day, not part of any particular month, and it would be a sort of global sabbath.

Avery Trufelman:
Aside from Year Day, all other vacations would be moved to a Monday.

Mark Byrnes:
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.

Roman Mars:
None of that nonsense. Holidays would all be three day weekends. No Wednesdays off.

Avery Trufelman:
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.

Roman Mars:
George Eastman, the founder of Kodak.

Kathy Connor:
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 and pursued.

Avery Trufelman:
Kathy Connor is the curator of the George Eastman House and Collection in Rochester, New York.

Kathy Connor:
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.

Roman Mars:
Eastman basically took it upon himself to promote Cotsworth’s calendar design, and he started a Calendar League Headquarters in Rochester, in Kodak’s office.

Kathy Connor:
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.

Avery Trufelman:
They actually convinced a few local businesses to switch to a 13-month calendar.

Roman Mars:
Including, of course, Mr. Eastman’s own company.

Kathy Connor:
They adapted it at the Eastman Kodak Company in 1924, and they continued to use it until 1989. So, they had it 65 years.

Roman Mars:
Let me just repeat that they used this calendar until 1989.

Avery Trufelman:
Apparently, employees found it useful.

John Cirocco:
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.”

Avery Trufelman:
John Cirocco 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.

John Cirocco:
A couple of times, I’ve actually tried getting companies that I’ve worked for to go and use a 13-period ( four weeks times 13) calendar.

Roman Mars:
But like Moses Cotsworth and George Eastman before him, John Cirocco just couldn’t convince other businesses to take it on.

Avery Trufelman:
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.

John Cirocco:
I only knew it as this was the financial calendar of the Eastman Kodak company.

Roman Mars:
Kodak employees didn’t observe Sol or Year Day, or change every holiday to a Monday.

Avery Trufelman:
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.

John Cirocco:
Instead of saying that today was March 6th, we would say that today is the third period, day three.

Roman Mars:
They used the 13-month calendar as an organizational tool, for planning finances and production schedules.

John Cirocco:
We programmed and we wrote and we designed applications to work within the Kodak 13 periods, but we still lived our life the way the normal Gregorian calendar was.

Avery Trufelman:
Because, of 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.

Roman Mars:
And this is basically the same reason why it would be so hard for the larger world to adopt a 13-month calendar.

Mark Byrnes:
The explanation for how July 4th would work is kind of like the perfect example of how complicated it would be to mentally adjust to this new calendar.

Roman Mars:
That’s journalist Mark Byrnes again.

Avery Trufelman:
Okay, so on the 13-month calendar schedule, July 4th would have to be moved to a Monday, like all the holidays. So then-

Mark Byrnes:
It would really be July 2nd.

Roman Mars:
But when you add in Sol, and shuffle the dates around accordingly, that actual day on the solar calendar wouldn’t fall in July anymore.

Avery Trufelman:
It would actually be Sol 17. But that falls on a Tuesday, so again, you’ve got to make that a Monday, so it would end up as Sol 16.

Mark Byrnes:
So, there’s nothing as patriotic as celebrating Sol 16.

Avery Trufelman:
This is why the calendar, in 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.

Roman Mars:
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.

Kathy Connor:
He and Mr. Cotsworth, 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.

Avery Trufelman:
And this was taken completely seriously.

Mark Byrnes:
Calendar reform became an actual issue of debate for the League of Nations.

Roman Mars:
The League of Nations, as in the precursor to the U.N.

Mark Byrnes:
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.

Avery Trufelman:
Even after George Eastman passed away in 1932, the League of Nations continued discussing calendar redesign.

Mark Byrnes:
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. Then the League of Nations folded.

Roman Mars:
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 finances and planning.

Avery Trufelman:
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 and the rotation of the Earth. God, I’ve spent too much time in California.

David Ewing Duncan:
It’s really a bizarre anomaly of history, that this calendar that started with Caesar and Cleopatra, that was reformed by a pope. It was really the Christian calendar… it’s now the calendar of the world.

Roman Mars:
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 longtime Kodak employee for this story.

Robert Shanebrook:
Yes. My name is Robert Shanebrook. I worked for Kodak for 35 years.

Roman Mars:
Robert wrote a book about how Kodak film was made, called ‘Making Kodak Film.’ Its manufacturing process used to be top secret, but Robert got insider access to Kodak’s facilities.

Robert Shanebrook:
I spent 40 days photographing in the factory, like 165 photographs that show all the equipment, and explains the process.

Roman Mars:
This is like its own separate episode. Check it out, nerds. It’s makingkodakfilm.com.