8 ms·

Why 11 days disappeared in 1752

134 points by mortenjorck 6y ago

maxk42 6y ago
I can't believe I'd never heard of this before, but apparently it's true. Some people born before 1753 were considered to have been born in two years simultaneously. https://genealogy.stackexchange.com/questions/132/what-is-a-double-date https://genealogy.stackexchange.com/questions/132/what-is-a-...
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  Crazier still.... > Imagine – a person could have been married on April 26, 1710 and died on Feb 2, 1710. (Because the new year began on March 25 prior to 1752)
  - maxpro 6y ago
    That's crazy for us. But for them the year was from March to February (ok from March 25th to March 24th :D).
    - macintux 6y ago
      Still, dying 2 months before getting married was crazy for them, too.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  "What year was George Washington born" makes for a great trivia question; there is no answer.
  - juststeve 6y ago
    i think that was 1732
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      He was born in 1731. In the calendar reforms of 1752, February 1731 retroactively became February 1732. So, when he was 15 years old, he had been born in 1731, but by the time he was 30, he had been born in 1732.
  - drdec 6y ago
    Of course there is, one only needs to specify which calendar one is using when giving the answer. You could answer in the Chinese calendar if you wanted. I'm trying to describe this without antagonism, forgive me if I fall. But your question to me sounds just like saying, "at what temperature does water freeze?" and claiming there is no answer because Fahrenheit and Celsius both exist. I feel like the article makes a similar mistake in claiming that certain dates did not exist. They are simply different calendars and the dates existed even if no one called them that date when they happened. It's like saying the 4th of July, 1776 BCE didn't exist - of course it did but nobody called it that at the time.
peapicker 6y ago
Took even longer in Eastern Europe and the Eastern Orthodox countries. The last country of Eastern Orthodox Europe to adopt the Gregorian calendar for civil purposes was Greece, only ~100 years ago, at the time under military administration following the 11 September 1922 Revolution, with Wednesday 15 February 1923 being followed by Thursday 1 March 1923.
- sb057 6y ago
  For anyone looking for an interesting rabbit trail, they may want to read up on Eastern Orthodox calendars and their controversies; specifically, the Revised Julian calendar, which is effectively a more accurate Gregorian calendar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar
- billfruit 6y ago
  I guess these countries still follow the older calendar still for some church activities. This years Easter is yet to to happen in Russia, for example.
- tdeck 6y ago
  This also explains the confusing naming of the two Russian revolutions: The February/March revolution, and the October/November revolution.
- acdw 6y ago
  I read an essay once by Isaac Asimov about this fact .. and I remember that in russia they hadn't fully switched when he was born, but did before his family immigrated to America. By that time the loss was 13 days, and he ended the essay by saying, "Where are my thirteen days? Give me my thirteen days!"
JNRowe 6y ago
emotion note: JNRowe heavily suspires I was going to say that cal on Linux correctly displays the weird year, then I ran "cal 9 1752" and thought I had misremembered. Five minutes in to the rabbit hole says Debian uses bsdmainutils for cal, where on other distros you may receive util-linux's version¹. So, it is entirely dependent on an obscure choice of a maintainer whether you get the "missing" days in your output or not. Made a thousand times stranger if, like me, you have ncal aliased to cal so that it uses your locale's week format. ncal does display the weird September for me, unless called with the -b flag for classic output. The problem is you want the -b flag if you are naïvely trying to fix the Monday should be the start of the week issue with cal. This is my favourite quirky behaviour of at least this week, if not longer. Tonnes of sensible decisions that all interact in utterly weird ways to make very little sense without The Ultimate Shovel to dig around with. -- Interestingly, ncal supports showing you where the changeover happened in various locations by providing the -p flag which shows some more data to expand on peapicker's comment. You can even play around with the calendars in various locales with ncal by specifying the -s flag, for example "ncal -s GR 3 1924" to see peapicker's Greece example. ¹ https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/blob/master/misc-utils/cal.c https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/blob/master/misc-util... - Gory handling details
- skissane 6y ago
  > So, it is entirely dependent on an obscure choice of a maintainer whether you get the "missing" days in your output or not. I think defaulting to removing the days in 1752 is rather Anglo-centric. That was when the British Empire adopted the Gregorian calendar, but other places adopted it earlier or later. I can think of some other options which in my mind are all superior to using 1752 as a default: - Work out the appropriate cutoff point based on the user's configured locale or current geographic location - Use the original introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582 as the default cutoff. (This is also the correct answer for Spain, Portugal, France, Poland, Italy, and for the former members of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires.) - Don't use a cutoff and just use the proleptic Gregorian calendar - For potentially ambiguous dates – basically anything from the initial introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, through to its adoption by Greece in 1923 [0] – ask the user to either choose between Julian or Gregorian, or specify a locale/country/territory for the date (from which the choice can be inferred) [0] Turkey and Saudi Arabia adopted the Gregorian calendar after Greece did, but they don't count because they never used the Julian calendar – they switched their official calendars from Islamic to Gregorian, in 1926 and 2016 respectively. Greece was the last country to make the Julian to Gregorian switch for civil purposes
lovecg 6y ago
They could’ve just skipped adding a day in leap years for like 40 years and avoid the big disruption. Apparently this was considered as one of the proposals but didn’t go through.
- sio8ohPi 6y ago
  Sweden tried to do this. Of course, it meant they would be out of sync with both Julian and Gregorian calendars for 40 years, so after skipping Feb 29th in 1700, they gave up and reverted the the Julian calendar in 1712 (by adding February 30th to the calendar).
- rk06 6y ago
  that would have resulted in the two calendars remaining out of sync for 40 years. no wonder it didn't go through
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
rozab 6y ago
I was going to bring up how Russia was apparently late to the War of the Third Coalition due to still being on the old calendar, but it turns out to be not true: http://dcjack.org/kagan%20on%20ulm.html http://dcjack.org/kagan%20on%20ulm.html I have also heard similar (fanciful) stories about the start of WW1, when Russia was still on Julian.
cbfrench 6y ago
I believe this is why some parts of Appalachia still celebrate “Old Christmas” on January 6, which is Epiphany for the rest of the Western church. To my knowledge, this doesn’t affect their observance of Easter, which conforms to the Gregorian date.
- _delirium 6y ago
  The different Easter dates are complicated and not necessarily the same question as Julian vs. Gregorian (though there is a connection). Churches might go either way on the two questions independently. For example, modern Greece is the exact opposite of what you describe for Appalachia: Greek Orthodoxy has adopted the Gregorian calendar, and celebrates Christmas on December 25 every year. But it uses a different ("Eastern Christian") method of calculating the date of Easter, which sometimes coincides with Western Easter, but sometimes can differ from the Western method by as much as 4-5 weeks. I don't fully understand it, but it has something to do with: secular calendars, lunar calendars, and how you compute the date for Passover.
  - dhosek 6y ago
    It's even more interesting than you say—the Greeks (and some other Orthodox churches) use the Revised Julian Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar which aligns with the Gregorian calendar for roughly the millenium spanning 1700–2700. To make this work, they had their own skippage of days in 1923.
    - skissane 6y ago
      The Gregorian and Revised Julian calendars agree up to 28 February 2800. The next day, they begin to diverge – 28 Feb 2800 is followed by 29 Feb 2800 in the Gregorian, but 1 March 2800 in the Revised Julian, and from then onwards the Revised Julian Calendar remains one day ahead. In 2900, they pull temporarily back into synch; in that year, the Revised Julian Calendar has a leap year, but the Gregorian doesn't. In the year 3200, they fall out of synch again, and the Revised Julian once again becomes one day ahead of the Gregorian. I really wonder what the Gregorian-calendar-using parts of the Eastern Orthodox Church are going to do in the year 2800 – assuming they are still around. Will they remember they are supposed to be using the Revised Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian? Or will they decide that being a day ahead of the civil calendar isn't worth the hassle? Maybe by the year 2800 there will be people living on Mars, and maybe even some of them will be Christians, even Eastern Orthodox Christians. I wonder if they will insist on using the Earth calendar, complete with Earth days of exactly 86,400 seconds, and with the boundary between Earth days shifting awkwardly through the Martian day? Or will they adopt a liturgical calendar based on the Martian sol (which is 2219.6 seconds longer than the Earth day)? Do they use the Martian year of 668 sols, or the Earth year of 355 sols, as their liturgical year? The whole Gregorian vs Julian debate, which is still alive in the Eastern Orthodox Church, makes little sense on Mars.
jtchang 6y ago
Just thinking about the number of edge cases if this happened today gives me palpitations. And I thought this whole daylight saving time thing is ridiculous. Hold my beer, along comes the Church of England.
crooked-v 6y ago
Faction Paradox stole those days, obviously.[1] [1]: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Eleven-Day_Empire https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Eleven-Day_Empire
howenterprisey 6y ago
This receives an extended, hilarious, discussion in Thomas Pynchon's book Mason & Dixon, in which an astronomer sits at a bar and everyone complains at him about losing their eleven days, and when they can have the days back, etc.
- gnulinux 6y ago
  Pynchon is simply amazing. One day I want to be able read one of his books and understand it.
antognini 6y ago
The article mentions this, but for those who just read the comments, the missing eleven days was not the only weird thing about 1752. Prior to this year, New Year's Day in England was observed on March 25 (the Feast of the Annunciation). So, for example, March 24, 1741 would be followed by March 25, 1742. This was known as "Annunciation dating" and was common throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. By the 1700s most of Europe had moved New Year's Day to January 1 (known as "circumcision dating" because it fell on the Feast of the Circumcision), but England had stayed on the old system. In 1750, Parliament had had enough and harmonized the calendar with the rest of Europe. By decree, 1752 would begin on January 1 the day after December 31, 1751. This meant that January and February of 1751 did not exist! In fact, in England 1751 had only 288 days. Since England's calendar was unusual by European standards people had adapted "dual dating" techniques to avoid confusion [1]. The most common was to write a date with two years, one on top of the other. So you would say January 15, 1748/49, with the 48 on top of the 49. And 1751/52 weren't the only weird years in history. When the Julian calendar was adopted, the previous calendar had drifted so far from the seasons that two leap months needed to be added, which made the year 46 BC 445 days long. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_dating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_dating [Edited to correct Assumption to Annunciation.]
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > By the 1700s most of Europe had moved New Year's Day to January 1 (known as "circumcision dating" because it fell on the Feast of the Circumcision) Do we know why this happened? In a world context, beginning the year in spring is normal; beginning it in the middle of winter is very weird indeed. And it's not like this was a restoration of an older tradition. Four of the months are still literally named on the assumption that the first month of the year is March.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jauco 6y ago
    It kind of was the restoration of an older tradition: http://www.britannica.com/story/why-does-the-new-year-start-on-january-1 http://www.britannica.com/story/why-does-the-new-year-start-... though it is apparently not very clear who exactly started it and why that person did it.
dhosek 6y ago
There's some oversimplification of things in that even the first countries to adopt the Gregorian calendar (Spain, Portugal, France, Poland, Italy, Catholic Low Countries, Luxemburg, and their colonies in 1582), lost 10 days in the transition. They make it seem as if the 11 day discrepancy happened in the relatively short time between the creation of the Gregorian calendar and its adoption in Britain. Wikipedia is silent on this, but the skipped days are there to make up for the errors in the Julian calendar dating back to the beginning of the common era, and not merely the transition as decreed by Pope Gregory.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > Wikipedia is silent on this, but the skipped days are there to make up for the errors in the Julian calendar dating back to the beginning of the common era, and not merely the transition as decreed by Pope Gregory. And Pope Gregory did this so as to put the equinoxes and solstices back to where they 'should' be: on the 20-22st of their respective months. Most importantly (to the Pope/Catholics/Christians) was the March equinox, the first day of spring, because that determined when Passover/Easter was supposed to be celebrated. Jesus of Nazareth was crucified on Passover (Friday): > So sure enough, when we come to the Gospels, what does Jesus do? When He goes to Jerusalem to die, does He do it at the Feast of the Day of Atonement? No. Does He do it at the Feast of Hanukkah? He could have died at Hanukkah. No. Does He do it at their New Year Festival? No. When does He choose to go down Jerusalem? At Passover, and there’s a reason. He, of course, knows the Scriptures, but as a Jew He’s going to fulfill even their traditions about the fact that the Messiah was going to come on Passover night, and He’s going to die just like the Passover lamb died. […] > The first Passover started in Egypt with slavery to pharaoh and it ends in the Holy Land. But Jesus’s new Passover—watch this—starts in the Holy Land and where does it end? Where does it lead? Not to the earthly promised land, but to where? To Heaven. > Because, see, ultimately the Passover is a shadow of what Christ is going to accomplish. He doesn’t come to set us free from political slavery to pharaoh. He comes to set us free from the slavery of sin. […] * https://catholicproductions.com/blogs/blog/passover-and-the-mass-remembrance-meal-and-sacrifice https://catholicproductions.com/blogs/blog/passover-and-the-... So to find the 'proper' day of Passover/Easter, one starts with the (northern hemisphere) Spring Equinox, move forward to the first full moon, and the first Sunday after it is Easter Sunday: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus If the day of your equinox is off, so is the celebration of your salvation from sin.
pram 6y ago
The history behind the Julian calendar is reminiscent of the Unix time problem(s). They were aware of the leap time issue when they designed it. Because it would take so long to accumulate enough leap days to become a burden, it just didn’t matter that much at the time of creation. 1500 years is a pretty good run!
mrweasel 6y ago
The link just goes to some articles about golf.
- _trampeltier 6y ago
  Yes, for me too :-(
- ryannevius 6y ago
  Here's Google's cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8TiKyGwfqewJ:https://www.augustachronicle.com/lifestyle/20190316/your-story-why-did-11-days-disappear-in-1752+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=it&client=firefox-b-d https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8TiKyG...
Pinus 6y ago
Sweden did an... interesting version of calendar change. Like Britain, we stuck with the Julian calendar for quite some time. Then we decided to catch up with the Gregorian calendar by omitting leap days, starting from 1700 (this would have taken 40 years!). To make matters worse, the scheme was forgotten and 1704 and 1708 were leap years. In 1712, Charles XII decided to sync back to the Julian calendar by having an extra leap day, making a 30-day February, which I think is unique. We then finally went Gregorian by omitting 12 days at the end of February 1753.
- Avalaxy 6y ago
  Thankfully software didn't exist back then.
boyter 6y ago
Hah. This bit me once when a tester worked on my SQL server .NET app. As .NET supports dates before 1753 but sql server does not. Presumably because the original sybase devs didn’t want to add logic to deal with it. First time a unit not integration test bit me as the first thing the tester did was try year 1. Unit tests for that worked perfectly, and I who had been confident at that point learnt a lesson about hubris.
sigil 6y ago
You can see the discontinuity by running: cal 1752 in your shell!
- jraph 6y ago
  Indeed, look closely to September: 1752 January February March Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 26 27 28 29 30 31 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 29 30 31 April May June Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 1 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 26 27 28 29 30 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 28 29 30 31 July August September Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 1 1 2 14 15 16 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 26 27 28 29 30 31 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 October November December Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 1 2 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 29 30 31 26 27 28 29 30 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
wiz21c 6y ago
I wonder if the java date class handles this correctly (I know it handles various weird, surprising cases)...
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
Russian Orthodox Church is so orthodox that is still refuses to recognise this new calendar and uses Julian calendar. So Chrismas happens on Jan 7 and will soon move to Jan 8.
- input_sh 6y ago
  That's not specific to Russian Orthodox church, other orthodox churches do it as well (Balkans, Israel, Ethiopia, Egypt etc).
  - zczc 6y ago
    Not all orthodox churches: Greek and Bulgarian churches are on Gregorian calendar (technically on Revised Julian[1] which is aligned with Gregorian until the year 2800). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar
jjcm 6y ago
I ran a weekly trivia challenge when I was in high school. I'd offer up an obscure question, and the first to answer it won a free pizza. The one question that remained unanswered at the end of the year was, "what happened on September 10th, 1752 in Britain?" At the end of the year, I revealed the answer to that one question that had remained unanswered. Nothing had happened that day, as it didn't exist. Afterwards I had to explain the transition to from a Julian calendar to a Gregorian one to a very miffed group of trivia players.
kgeist 6y ago
>Among the last countries in the world to accept that they were using an inaccurate calendar were the British >1752 Mmmm, Russia and much of the Orthodox world switched to Gregorian only in the 20th century
Arcorann 6y ago
Something I never see being talked about in these sorts of threads is how Japan switched from the local lunisolar calendar to the Gregorian calendar. In the year 1872 (Meiji 5) the imperial government were paying their officials on a monthly basis, but their finances were in trouble, and the 6th month of the following year (Meiji 6) was a leap month which meant that they would have to budget an extra month's worth of pay for that year. Adopting the Gregorian calendar turned out to be a way out of this problem. As a "bonus", if they adopted it starting 1873 then the 12th month of the current year would only last two days and they could get away with skipping that month's pay completely. The calendar reform was officially announced on the 9th day of the 11th month of Meiji 5, or 9 December 1872, to take effect 1 January 1873. This understandably caught people off guard, especially since official calendar makers had already started selling calendars for the new year a month earlier.
- peter303 6y ago
  Caesar switch Europe to a solar calendar after seeing its advantage in Egypt. Egypt likely synced its calendar to when the star Sirius first appears in the dawn sky in July. This would not be accurate over long periods of time due precession and proper motion.
Tarsul 6y ago
did the article disappear, too? When I click on the link it goes to the main page. Edit: ah, down below someone had a link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8TiKyGwfqewJ:https://www.augustachronicle.com/lifestyle/20190316/your-story-why-did-11-days-disappear-in-1752+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=it&client=firefox-b-d https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8TiKyG...
yamrzou 6y ago
Archive: https://archive.fo/nGOAR https://archive.fo/nGOAR
schemescape 6y ago
> Because the people thought the government was trying to cheat them out of 11 days of their lives, there were riots in villages. The following article goes into more detail on this point: https://www.history.co.uk/article/the-calendar-riots-of-1752-when-britain-lost-11-days https://www.history.co.uk/article/the-calendar-riots-of-1752... Edit: It sounds like it's disputed whether or not these riots actually happened.
ourmandave 6y ago
Also why 1753/01/01 is a magic number on Sql Server. (And not because that's when Bill Gates sailed the Ocean Blue.)
andrepd 6y ago
The plot of an excellent Don Rosa story, "Crown of the Crusader Kings". Although "excellent" and "Don Rosa story" are redundant :)
jiofih 6y ago
The linked page is 100% ads on mobile, the article content is nowhere to be found.
- samizdis 6y ago
  There's an archived version here: https://archive.is/nGOAR https://archive.is/nGOAR

134 points by mortenjorck 6y ago

I can't believe I'd never heard of this before, but apparently it's true. Some people born before 1753 were considered to have been born in two years simultaneously. https://genealogy.stackexchange.com/questions/132/what-is-a-double-date https://genealogy.stackexchange.com/questions/132/what-is-a-...

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
Crazier still.... > Imagine – a person could have been married on April 26, 1710 and died on Feb 2, 1710. (Because the new year began on March 25 prior to 1752)
- maxpro 6y ago
  That's crazy for us. But for them the year was from March to February (ok from March 25th to March 24th :D).
  - macintux 6y ago
    Still, dying 2 months before getting married was crazy for them, too.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
"What year was George Washington born" makes for a great trivia question; there is no answer.
- juststeve 6y ago
  i think that was 1732
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    He was born in 1731. In the calendar reforms of 1752, February 1731 retroactively became February 1732. So, when he was 15 years old, he had been born in 1731, but by the time he was 30, he had been born in 1732.
- drdec 6y ago
  Of course there is, one only needs to specify which calendar one is using when giving the answer. You could answer in the Chinese calendar if you wanted. I'm trying to describe this without antagonism, forgive me if I fall. But your question to me sounds just like saying, "at what temperature does water freeze?" and claiming there is no answer because Fahrenheit and Celsius both exist. I feel like the article makes a similar mistake in claiming that certain dates did not exist. They are simply different calendars and the dates existed even if no one called them that date when they happened. It's like saying the 4th of July, 1776 BCE didn't exist - of course it did but nobody called it that at the time.

peapicker 6y ago

Took even longer in Eastern Europe and the Eastern Orthodox countries. The last country of Eastern Orthodox Europe to adopt the Gregorian calendar for civil purposes was Greece, only ~100 years ago, at the time under military administration following the 11 September 1922 Revolution, with Wednesday 15 February 1923 being followed by Thursday 1 March 1923.

sb057 6y ago
For anyone looking for an interesting rabbit trail, they may want to read up on Eastern Orthodox calendars and their controversies; specifically, the Revised Julian calendar, which is effectively a more accurate Gregorian calendar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar
billfruit 6y ago
I guess these countries still follow the older calendar still for some church activities. This years Easter is yet to to happen in Russia, for example.
tdeck 6y ago
This also explains the confusing naming of the two Russian revolutions: The February/March revolution, and the October/November revolution.
acdw 6y ago
I read an essay once by Isaac Asimov about this fact .. and I remember that in russia they hadn't fully switched when he was born, but did before his family immigrated to America. By that time the loss was 13 days, and he ended the essay by saying, "Where are my thirteen days? Give me my thirteen days!"

JNRowe 6y ago

emotion note: JNRowe heavily suspires I was going to say that cal on Linux correctly displays the weird year, then I ran "cal 9 1752" and thought I had misremembered. Five minutes in to the rabbit hole says Debian uses bsdmainutils for cal, where on other distros you may receive util-linux's version¹. So, it is entirely dependent on an obscure choice of a maintainer whether you get the "missing" days in your output or not. Made a thousand times stranger if, like me, you have ncal aliased to cal so that it uses your locale's week format. ncal does display the weird September for me, unless called with the -b flag for classic output. The problem is you want the -b flag if you are naïvely trying to fix the Monday should be the start of the week issue with cal. This is my favourite quirky behaviour of at least this week, if not longer. Tonnes of sensible decisions that all interact in utterly weird ways to make very little sense without The Ultimate Shovel to dig around with. -- Interestingly, ncal supports showing you where the changeover happened in various locations by providing the -p flag which shows some more data to expand on peapicker's comment. You can even play around with the calendars in various locales with ncal by specifying the -s flag, for example "ncal -s GR 3 1924" to see peapicker's Greece example. ¹ https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/blob/master/misc-utils/cal.c https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/blob/master/misc-util... - Gory handling details

skissane 6y ago
> So, it is entirely dependent on an obscure choice of a maintainer whether you get the "missing" days in your output or not. I think defaulting to removing the days in 1752 is rather Anglo-centric. That was when the British Empire adopted the Gregorian calendar, but other places adopted it earlier or later. I can think of some other options which in my mind are all superior to using 1752 as a default: - Work out the appropriate cutoff point based on the user's configured locale or current geographic location - Use the original introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582 as the default cutoff. (This is also the correct answer for Spain, Portugal, France, Poland, Italy, and for the former members of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires.) - Don't use a cutoff and just use the proleptic Gregorian calendar - For potentially ambiguous dates – basically anything from the initial introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, through to its adoption by Greece in 1923 [0] – ask the user to either choose between Julian or Gregorian, or specify a locale/country/territory for the date (from which the choice can be inferred) [0] Turkey and Saudi Arabia adopted the Gregorian calendar after Greece did, but they don't count because they never used the Julian calendar – they switched their official calendars from Islamic to Gregorian, in 1926 and 2016 respectively. Greece was the last country to make the Julian to Gregorian switch for civil purposes

lovecg 6y ago

They could’ve just skipped adding a day in leap years for like 40 years and avoid the big disruption. Apparently this was considered as one of the proposals but didn’t go through.

sio8ohPi 6y ago
Sweden tried to do this. Of course, it meant they would be out of sync with both Julian and Gregorian calendars for 40 years, so after skipping Feb 29th in 1700, they gave up and reverted the the Julian calendar in 1712 (by adding February 30th to the calendar).
rk06 6y ago
that would have resulted in the two calendars remaining out of sync for 40 years. no wonder it didn't go through
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

rozab 6y ago

I was going to bring up how Russia was apparently late to the War of the Third Coalition due to still being on the old calendar, but it turns out to be not true: http://dcjack.org/kagan%20on%20ulm.html http://dcjack.org/kagan%20on%20ulm.html I have also heard similar (fanciful) stories about the start of WW1, when Russia was still on Julian.

cbfrench 6y ago

I believe this is why some parts of Appalachia still celebrate “Old Christmas” on January 6, which is Epiphany for the rest of the Western church. To my knowledge, this doesn’t affect their observance of Easter, which conforms to the Gregorian date.

_delirium 6y ago
The different Easter dates are complicated and not necessarily the same question as Julian vs. Gregorian (though there is a connection). Churches might go either way on the two questions independently. For example, modern Greece is the exact opposite of what you describe for Appalachia: Greek Orthodoxy has adopted the Gregorian calendar, and celebrates Christmas on December 25 every year. But it uses a different ("Eastern Christian") method of calculating the date of Easter, which sometimes coincides with Western Easter, but sometimes can differ from the Western method by as much as 4-5 weeks. I don't fully understand it, but it has something to do with: secular calendars, lunar calendars, and how you compute the date for Passover.
- dhosek 6y ago
  It's even more interesting than you say—the Greeks (and some other Orthodox churches) use the Revised Julian Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar which aligns with the Gregorian calendar for roughly the millenium spanning 1700–2700. To make this work, they had their own skippage of days in 1923.
  - skissane 6y ago
    The Gregorian and Revised Julian calendars agree up to 28 February 2800. The next day, they begin to diverge – 28 Feb 2800 is followed by 29 Feb 2800 in the Gregorian, but 1 March 2800 in the Revised Julian, and from then onwards the Revised Julian Calendar remains one day ahead. In 2900, they pull temporarily back into synch; in that year, the Revised Julian Calendar has a leap year, but the Gregorian doesn't. In the year 3200, they fall out of synch again, and the Revised Julian once again becomes one day ahead of the Gregorian. I really wonder what the Gregorian-calendar-using parts of the Eastern Orthodox Church are going to do in the year 2800 – assuming they are still around. Will they remember they are supposed to be using the Revised Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian? Or will they decide that being a day ahead of the civil calendar isn't worth the hassle? Maybe by the year 2800 there will be people living on Mars, and maybe even some of them will be Christians, even Eastern Orthodox Christians. I wonder if they will insist on using the Earth calendar, complete with Earth days of exactly 86,400 seconds, and with the boundary between Earth days shifting awkwardly through the Martian day? Or will they adopt a liturgical calendar based on the Martian sol (which is 2219.6 seconds longer than the Earth day)? Do they use the Martian year of 668 sols, or the Earth year of 355 sols, as their liturgical year? The whole Gregorian vs Julian debate, which is still alive in the Eastern Orthodox Church, makes little sense on Mars.

jtchang 6y ago

Just thinking about the number of edge cases if this happened today gives me palpitations. And I thought this whole daylight saving time thing is ridiculous. Hold my beer, along comes the Church of England.

crooked-v 6y ago

Faction Paradox stole those days, obviously.[1] [1]: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Eleven-Day_Empire https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Eleven-Day_Empire

howenterprisey 6y ago

This receives an extended, hilarious, discussion in Thomas Pynchon's book Mason & Dixon, in which an astronomer sits at a bar and everyone complains at him about losing their eleven days, and when they can have the days back, etc.

gnulinux 6y ago
Pynchon is simply amazing. One day I want to be able read one of his books and understand it.

antognini 6y ago

The article mentions this, but for those who just read the comments, the missing eleven days was not the only weird thing about 1752. Prior to this year, New Year's Day in England was observed on March 25 (the Feast of the Annunciation). So, for example, March 24, 1741 would be followed by March 25, 1742. This was known as "Annunciation dating" and was common throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. By the 1700s most of Europe had moved New Year's Day to January 1 (known as "circumcision dating" because it fell on the Feast of the Circumcision), but England had stayed on the old system. In 1750, Parliament had had enough and harmonized the calendar with the rest of Europe. By decree, 1752 would begin on January 1 the day after December 31, 1751. This meant that January and February of 1751 did not exist! In fact, in England 1751 had only 288 days. Since England's calendar was unusual by European standards people had adapted "dual dating" techniques to avoid confusion [1]. The most common was to write a date with two years, one on top of the other. So you would say January 15, 1748/49, with the 48 on top of the 49. And 1751/52 weren't the only weird years in history. When the Julian calendar was adopted, the previous calendar had drifted so far from the seasons that two leap months needed to be added, which made the year 46 BC 445 days long. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_dating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_dating [Edited to correct Assumption to Annunciation.]

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> By the 1700s most of Europe had moved New Year's Day to January 1 (known as "circumcision dating" because it fell on the Feast of the Circumcision) Do we know why this happened? In a world context, beginning the year in spring is normal; beginning it in the middle of winter is very weird indeed. And it's not like this was a restoration of an older tradition. Four of the months are still literally named on the assumption that the first month of the year is March.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jauco 6y ago
  It kind of was the restoration of an older tradition: http://www.britannica.com/story/why-does-the-new-year-start-on-january-1 http://www.britannica.com/story/why-does-the-new-year-start-... though it is apparently not very clear who exactly started it and why that person did it.

dhosek 6y ago

There's some oversimplification of things in that even the first countries to adopt the Gregorian calendar (Spain, Portugal, France, Poland, Italy, Catholic Low Countries, Luxemburg, and their colonies in 1582), lost 10 days in the transition. They make it seem as if the 11 day discrepancy happened in the relatively short time between the creation of the Gregorian calendar and its adoption in Britain. Wikipedia is silent on this, but the skipped days are there to make up for the errors in the Julian calendar dating back to the beginning of the common era, and not merely the transition as decreed by Pope Gregory.

throw0101a 6y ago
> Wikipedia is silent on this, but the skipped days are there to make up for the errors in the Julian calendar dating back to the beginning of the common era, and not merely the transition as decreed by Pope Gregory. And Pope Gregory did this so as to put the equinoxes and solstices back to where they 'should' be: on the 20-22st of their respective months. Most importantly (to the Pope/Catholics/Christians) was the March equinox, the first day of spring, because that determined when Passover/Easter was supposed to be celebrated. Jesus of Nazareth was crucified on Passover (Friday): > So sure enough, when we come to the Gospels, what does Jesus do? When He goes to Jerusalem to die, does He do it at the Feast of the Day of Atonement? No. Does He do it at the Feast of Hanukkah? He could have died at Hanukkah. No. Does He do it at their New Year Festival? No. When does He choose to go down Jerusalem? At Passover, and there’s a reason. He, of course, knows the Scriptures, but as a Jew He’s going to fulfill even their traditions about the fact that the Messiah was going to come on Passover night, and He’s going to die just like the Passover lamb died. […] > The first Passover started in Egypt with slavery to pharaoh and it ends in the Holy Land. But Jesus’s new Passover—watch this—starts in the Holy Land and where does it end? Where does it lead? Not to the earthly promised land, but to where? To Heaven. > Because, see, ultimately the Passover is a shadow of what Christ is going to accomplish. He doesn’t come to set us free from political slavery to pharaoh. He comes to set us free from the slavery of sin. […] * https://catholicproductions.com/blogs/blog/passover-and-the-mass-remembrance-meal-and-sacrifice https://catholicproductions.com/blogs/blog/passover-and-the-... So to find the 'proper' day of Passover/Easter, one starts with the (northern hemisphere) Spring Equinox, move forward to the first full moon, and the first Sunday after it is Easter Sunday: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus If the day of your equinox is off, so is the celebration of your salvation from sin.

pram 6y ago

The history behind the Julian calendar is reminiscent of the Unix time problem(s). They were aware of the leap time issue when they designed it. Because it would take so long to accumulate enough leap days to become a burden, it just didn’t matter that much at the time of creation. 1500 years is a pretty good run!

mrweasel 6y ago

The link just goes to some articles about golf.

_trampeltier 6y ago
Yes, for me too :-(
ryannevius 6y ago
Here's Google's cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8TiKyGwfqewJ:https://www.augustachronicle.com/lifestyle/20190316/your-story-why-did-11-days-disappear-in-1752+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=it&client=firefox-b-d https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8TiKyG...

Pinus 6y ago

Sweden did an... interesting version of calendar change. Like Britain, we stuck with the Julian calendar for quite some time. Then we decided to catch up with the Gregorian calendar by omitting leap days, starting from 1700 (this would have taken 40 years!). To make matters worse, the scheme was forgotten and 1704 and 1708 were leap years. In 1712, Charles XII decided to sync back to the Julian calendar by having an extra leap day, making a 30-day February, which I think is unique. We then finally went Gregorian by omitting 12 days at the end of February 1753.

Avalaxy 6y ago
Thankfully software didn't exist back then.

boyter 6y ago

Hah. This bit me once when a tester worked on my SQL server .NET app. As .NET supports dates before 1753 but sql server does not. Presumably because the original sybase devs didn’t want to add logic to deal with it. First time a unit not integration test bit me as the first thing the tester did was try year 1. Unit tests for that worked perfectly, and I who had been confident at that point learnt a lesson about hubris.

sigil 6y ago

You can see the discontinuity by running: cal 1752 in your shell!

jraph 6y ago
Indeed, look closely to September: 1752 January February March Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 26 27 28 29 30 31 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 29 30 31 April May June Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 1 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 26 27 28 29 30 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 28 29 30 31 July August September Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 1 1 2 14 15 16 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 26 27 28 29 30 31 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 October November December Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 1 2 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 29 30 31 26 27 28 29 30 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

wiz21c 6y ago

I wonder if the java date class handles this correctly (I know it handles various weird, surprising cases)...

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

Russian Orthodox Church is so orthodox that is still refuses to recognise this new calendar and uses Julian calendar. So Chrismas happens on Jan 7 and will soon move to Jan 8.

input_sh 6y ago
That's not specific to Russian Orthodox church, other orthodox churches do it as well (Balkans, Israel, Ethiopia, Egypt etc).
- zczc 6y ago
  Not all orthodox churches: Greek and Bulgarian churches are on Gregorian calendar (technically on Revised Julian[1] which is aligned with Gregorian until the year 2800). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar

jjcm 6y ago

I ran a weekly trivia challenge when I was in high school. I'd offer up an obscure question, and the first to answer it won a free pizza. The one question that remained unanswered at the end of the year was, "what happened on September 10th, 1752 in Britain?" At the end of the year, I revealed the answer to that one question that had remained unanswered. Nothing had happened that day, as it didn't exist. Afterwards I had to explain the transition to from a Julian calendar to a Gregorian one to a very miffed group of trivia players.

kgeist 6y ago

>Among the last countries in the world to accept that they were using an inaccurate calendar were the British >1752 Mmmm, Russia and much of the Orthodox world switched to Gregorian only in the 20th century

Arcorann 6y ago

Something I never see being talked about in these sorts of threads is how Japan switched from the local lunisolar calendar to the Gregorian calendar. In the year 1872 (Meiji 5) the imperial government were paying their officials on a monthly basis, but their finances were in trouble, and the 6th month of the following year (Meiji 6) was a leap month which meant that they would have to budget an extra month's worth of pay for that year. Adopting the Gregorian calendar turned out to be a way out of this problem. As a "bonus", if they adopted it starting 1873 then the 12th month of the current year would only last two days and they could get away with skipping that month's pay completely. The calendar reform was officially announced on the 9th day of the 11th month of Meiji 5, or 9 December 1872, to take effect 1 January 1873. This understandably caught people off guard, especially since official calendar makers had already started selling calendars for the new year a month earlier.

peter303 6y ago
Caesar switch Europe to a solar calendar after seeing its advantage in Egypt. Egypt likely synced its calendar to when the star Sirius first appears in the dawn sky in July. This would not be accurate over long periods of time due precession and proper motion.

Tarsul 6y ago

did the article disappear, too? When I click on the link it goes to the main page. Edit: ah, down below someone had a link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8TiKyGwfqewJ:https://www.augustachronicle.com/lifestyle/20190316/your-story-why-did-11-days-disappear-in-1752+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=it&client=firefox-b-d https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8TiKyG...

yamrzou 6y ago

Archive: https://archive.fo/nGOAR https://archive.fo/nGOAR

schemescape 6y ago

> Because the people thought the government was trying to cheat them out of 11 days of their lives, there were riots in villages. The following article goes into more detail on this point: https://www.history.co.uk/article/the-calendar-riots-of-1752-when-britain-lost-11-days https://www.history.co.uk/article/the-calendar-riots-of-1752... Edit: It sounds like it's disputed whether or not these riots actually happened.

ourmandave 6y ago

Also why 1753/01/01 is a magic number on Sql Server. (And not because that's when Bill Gates sailed the Ocean Blue.)

andrepd 6y ago

The plot of an excellent Don Rosa story, "Crown of the Crusader Kings". Although "excellent" and "Don Rosa story" are redundant :)

jiofih 6y ago

The linked page is 100% ads on mobile, the article content is nowhere to be found.

samizdis 6y ago
There's an archived version here: https://archive.is/nGOAR https://archive.is/nGOAR