Gregorian Calendar: a look at history

Can anyone tell what happened to the time interval between 4 and 15 October 1582? In fact, nothing happened, because the ten days were simply absent. And here`s why...
New Year - a great reason to take another look at a tool that we all are used to divide the year into days, weeks and months: we are talking about the calendar. In addition, to find the lost days of the above we turn to history.
One year lasts exactly 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes and 45 seconds, or 365.2422, as you prefer. For convenience, at the dawn of evolution, people decided to break time for short periods of time, which led to the creation of the calendar. Depending on the civilization, the calendar is a lunar or solar; the latter is the Gregorian calendar, the most widely used in the world.

Gregorian calendar

As the name suggests, it was introduced in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, with the assistance of astronomer Lilio. The purpose of the Gregorian calendar was the Julian correction developed in 46 BC by Julius Caesar and the astronomer Sosigen. Julian calendar contained mistakes, so how wrong was calculated duration of the year, and as a result, it has been lost 0,078 parts. At first glance it may seem that it`s not much, but considering the fact that the Julian calendar used in 325 AD, the loss amounted ten days to the 1582 years. The Gregorian calendar, this error was corrected when it was announced that for the October 5, 1582 followed by October 15, and not the fifth.
Like the Julian calendar, the Gregorian calendar also includes three years with simple 365th days, followed by a leap year with 366th days. But in order to correct an inaccuracy in 0.0078, the leap year will be abolished every hundred years, excluding those ages that are divisible by 400. Thus, 1900 and 2100 are not leap years, while 2000 and 2300 are considered as such.
Catholic countries adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, while for the Protestant countries took more than a century for this: they have to use the new calendar in 1700; in the UK - in 1752, in Japan - in 1873 and in China - 1912.

Pope Gregory XIII

Amazing, is not it? In 2014, we use a system developed in the 16th century. It is surprising the accuracy with which our ancestors are able to measure the length of the year. Let`s take, for example, the Egyptian calendar, which was used from 4236 BC. Its error was only 6 hours per year, or just 0.07 %!
The watchmakers tried to reproduce the calendar posting 1461 days of irregular cycles between 29 February of a leap year and February 29 of another four years later. This calendar is called the eternal and was first used in floor clocks. Then it was introduced in the clocks with a small size, followed by the pocket and wristwatches. But that`s another story.

Written by Lucy Vuiton