The calendar, that trusty old grid of varying numbers of squares, is something we tend to take for granted. But for Richard Conn Henry, an astronomer at The Johns Hopkins University, and Steve H. Hanke, an applied economist at JHU’s Whiting School of Engineering, the calendar is serious business. They have developed a new way of dividing up the year that would smooth out the modern iteration’s rough spots with surprisingly few changes.
The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar equalizes the length of the months, making every third month 31 days long and the rest 30 days long. Not only does this give the calendar four equal quarters, it also means that the year is never split in the middle of the week. It fixes the days of the week so that Jan. 1 always lands on a Sunday.
This new calendar is actually slightly less accurate than the current Gregorian calendar. However, the inaccuracy is carefully controlled by the addition of a seven-day “leap week” — called Xtr or Extra — at the end of certain years to keep the calendar in sync with both the seasons and the Gregorian calendar. The Hanke-Henry calendar is never more than five days off from the seasons, and 90 per cent of the time it is within three days of the Gregorian date.
The Hanke-Henry calendar is more efficient than the Gregorian calendar. New calendars do not need to be prepared each year, and the only variation from one year to the next is the occasional addition of the extra week. Christmas and New Year’s both fall on weekends, reducing the need for costly business shutdowns during the holiday season. The anomalies in the Gregorian calendar can make day counts for interest calculations difficult and costly, a problem easily fixed by normalizing the length of the months.
Hanke and Henry also advocate the adoption of Universal Time (formerly Greenwich Mean Time) and the abolition of time zones. Under this system, the time (measured on a 24-hour clock) would be the same everywhere, only working hours would change from place to place. This would, for instance, make it easier for banks to coordinate opening and closing hours.
It might seem like a long shot, but Hanke and Henry give examples of trends toward a more unified measurement of time. In 2010, Russia eliminated two of its 11 time zones. China has adopted a single time zone across the country, and aircraft pilots use Universal Time to coordinate flight plans and prevent collisions.
There have been many attempts at calendar reform in the past. George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, advocated for a 13-month calendar with 28 days per month. Science fiction author Isaac Asimov described a four-month World Season Calendar in his book The Tragedy of the Moon. The Hanke-Henry calendar itself is based on an earlier calendar devised by Bob McClenon.
Most attempts at calendar reform have failed. There are many reasons for this, but an important one pointed out by Henry is the breaking up of the seven-day cycle. Why is the length of the week so important? “Ask any Seventh Day Adventist. Or Orthodox Jew. Or genuine Christian,” says Henry, who notes that the Hanke-Henry calendar fully respects the Fourth Commandment, to honour the Sabbath day.
Hanke and Henry have marked Jan. 1 of this year as the intended start date for the adoption of their calendar. They believe the process could be mostly completed by Jan. 1, 2017. These two years are significant because, like the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, they both begin on a Sunday and end on a Saturday. Adoption of a new calendar would be expensive, but the cost is one-time only.
“It will be about as costly as the Y2K problem was,” says Henry on the calendar’s homepage, “Also, since we have just been through Y2K, we are in an ideal position to make a ‘second adjustment,’ having already located the software that needs to be adjusted, and learned how to do it.”
So, what are the chances of this actually happening? According to Henry, it is “not very likely” that the Hanke-Henry calendar will be adopted, especially in the absence of “highly-placed heroes.” However, a major calendar overhaul has happened before. The Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in what is now known as the year 46 BCE, was growing increasingly out of sync with the seasons by the sixteenth century. This made it especially difficult to set the date for Easter, which was beginning to drift into the summer.
On Feb. 24, 1582, Pope Gregory XIII officially introduced the Gregorian calendar, based on the work of astronomer Luigi Lilio. The Gregorian calendar took some time to be adopted, especially in non-Catholic countries like Britain, but it is almost ubiquitous today. The Julian calendar survives mostly in a ceremonial role.
Changing the calendar is no small feat, but may well be possible. In defence of his project, Henry offers an anecdote: “I vividly remember phoning my elderly mother, in my native Canada, some years before she died: and with astonishment hearing her quite casually say, ‘it was very hot today, 30 degrees.’ What this shows is that a nice conservative old lady was able to totally adapt to an alien idea, the Celsius temperature scale. We are all adaptable!”
illustration by philipp fisch
