The Calendar with 13 Months

Have you ever imagined having an extra month in the year, right between June and July? That's exactly what the International Fixed Calendar suggested, giving us a total of 13 months instead of 12. This idea has a long history, and there were people who truly believed it would be better than the calendar we use today.

The Beginning of the 13-Month Calendar

Our story begins in 1849 with a man named Augustus Comte. He was a thinker who believed that everything should be organized in a scientific way. To him, our current calendar, known as the Gregorian calendar, seemed too messy. So, he invented a new one called the "Positivist Calendar."

In Comte’s calendar, the year was divided into 13 months, each with exactly 28 days. This made a total of 364 days in a year. But since there are actually about 365 days in a year, he added one extra "celebration day" at the end. This day didn’t belong to any month or week and was meant to be a special day for remembering the dead. He even gave the months unique names like Moses, Homer, Aristotle, and Shakespeare, based on famous people from history. Although this idea was creative, it never caught on, and people kept using the Gregorian calendar.

The Calendar We Use Today: The Gregorian Calendar

The calendar most of us use today, the Gregorian calendar, was introduced by Pope Gregory the 13th in 1582. Before that, people used the Julian calendar, but it wasn’t accurate in keeping up with the actual time of the year. The Gregorian calendar corrected this by adding leap years, ensuring that our calendar matches the Earth's journey around the sun. This is why every four years we have an extra day in February.

Since the Gregorian calendar has been in use for over 400 years, it has become the standard calendar worldwide. But not everyone is satisfied with it, which is why the 13-month calendar idea came back into the picture.

Bringing Back the 13-Month Idea

In the early 1900s, a British accountant named Moses Cotsworth revisited the idea of a 13-month calendar. He worked for a railroad company and noticed that having different numbers of days in each month made it hard to keep track of schedules and compare business results. For example, it was tricky to compare sales from one month to another because some months were longer than others. This inconsistency bothered him, so he came up with a new version of the 13-month calendar, called the "International Fixed Calendar."

Cotsworth’s calendar was simple: every month had 28 days, making it easy to divide into four weeks. This means that every month started on a Sunday and ended on a Saturday. He added a new month called "Sol" between June and July, named after the sun, because it would include the summer solstice. Like Comte’s version, this calendar still totaled 364 days, and an extra "Year Day" was added at the end, which didn’t belong to any week or month. In leap years, there was also an extra "Leap Day."

The Eastman Kodak Company and the 13-Month Calendar

The International Fixed Calendar caught the attention of George Eastman, the founder of the famous Eastman Kodak Company. Eastman loved the idea of a predictable and organized calendar, so he decided to implement it in his company in 1928. For 61 years, until 1989, Kodak used this 13-month calendar for all its internal operations.

To make things easier for employees, every staff member had a pocket-sized version of the calendar, and large posters were placed in company boardrooms. The calendar helped make schedules more predictable, and the same date always fell on the same weekday every month. For example, the 1st of every month was always a Sunday, and the 10th was always a Tuesday. This made planning and managing work much simpler.

Challenges and Problems

Even though the 13-month calendar had many advantages, it wasn’t adopted by the rest of the world. Here are some reasons why:

Global Change Is Difficult: For a new calendar to work, everyone in the world would have to switch at the same time. If you were using the new calendar and needed to communicate with someone still using the old one, you’d have to convert the dates. This would be confusing and time-consuming, similar to trying to arrange a meeting with people in different time zones today.
Religious Concerns: Many religions have a special day of rest, like Saturday or Sunday. But in the 13-month calendar, the extra "Free Day" meant that this day of rest would shift every year. Religious leaders didn’t like this idea because it didn’t fit with their traditions.
Compatibility Issues: The switch from the old calendar to the new one would be as difficult as switching from old technology to new technology. For example, when people moved from VHS tapes to DVDs, it took a long time because they had to buy new equipment. In the same way, moving to a new calendar would mean changing many systems, documents, and habits.

The Struggle to Make It Popular

George Eastman didn’t give up easily. He tried to convince other businesses and even spoke to the League of Nations (an international organization) to promote the 13-month calendar. However, religious leaders and many others resisted the change, and it never gained wide acceptance.

One of the main reasons was that people were already very used to the Gregorian calendar, which has deep cultural and historical roots. Changing something that’s been in place for hundreds of years was simply too big of a challenge.

The End of the 13-Month Experiment

In the end, George Eastman’s health declined, and he passed away in 1932. However, Kodak continued using the 13-month calendar until 1989, making it one of the longest-running experiments with a different calendar system.

Today, we still use the Gregorian calendar, but the story of the 13-month calendar reminds us that there are always different ways to think about time. While it didn’t succeed in becoming the standard, it showed that sometimes, even big changes can start with one idea.