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9.12.2.1.2
Historical Background |
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Historically, 13-month calendars are not new. Variants have been used in different societies, typically as part of a lunar or lunisolar scheme. The first 13-month calendar of the modern sort, however, seems to have been proposed by the Italian Padre Abbe Mastrofini in 1834. |
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The French positivist philosopher, Auguste Comte, incorporated this modern invention into his conceptual grab bag as the Positivist Calendar (Le Calendrier Positiviste, 1852). |
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The intellectual history of 13-month calendars begins in the early 19th century, but the real impetus, taking the idea from concept to proposal, was the growth of large business interests around the end of the 19th century. These commercial interests were increasingly concerned about the costs, real and imagined, of performing the large numbers of computations and data processing functions which the increasing scope of business made necessary. Computers were unknown at the time, and calculations were done manually. The Second Wave technology of the time was very inflexible, and depended upon introducing a rigid kind of Procrustean simplification wherever possible. |
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In particular, shipping companies and railroads were experiencing problems with the fact that each city correctly observed the time according to its longitude. The concept of Standard Time passed from an 1870 proposal to the system of time zones used today in 1883. |
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By the 1920s, large commercial interests were ready to introduce further changes to time in the form of calendar reform. The object by this time was to obtain a calendar that simplified business calculations by introducing additional standardization. Elimination of variation in the lengths of months, the number of days in business |
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| Table 9.34 | | Common Year (365 days) | Leap Year (366 days) | | Gregorian Date | IFC Date | Gregorian Date | IFC Date | | NOV 04 | OCT 28 | <- | -> | NOV 01 | OCT 25 | | | NOV 05 | NOV 01 | <- | . . . | | . . . | | | . . . | | . . . | | | NOV 04 | OCT 28 | <- | | -> | NOV 30 | NOV 26 | | | NOV 05 | NOV 01 | <- | | -> | DEC 01 | NOV 27 | | . . . | | . . . | | | . . . | | . . . | | -> | NOV 30 | NOV 26 | | | DEC 30 | DEC 28 | <- | -> | DEC 01 | NOV 27 | | | -> | DEC 31 | SKIP DAY | | . . . | | . . . | | | | | | | DEC 30 | DEC 28 | <- | | | | | -> | DEC 31 | SKIP DAY | |
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