In 1752, around six million Britons were shocked when they realized that they have missed 11 days by sleeping on 2nd September.
But the truth was something else!
The calendar of that year had 11 days gone missing (infact, above a week!). If you observe the calendar of 1752, there is no existence of 13th September as well as 10 preceding days.
So what happened actually!
In 1528, Pope Gregory XIII, the then leader of the Catholic Church had a problem with finding solution to ‘Easter Day’. Pope Gregory found that the Julian calendar (implemented by Julius Caesar) had miscalculated days of a year as 365 days and 6 hours long.
But the average length of a year is 365 days, 5 hours and 49 minutes which indicated a difference of 11 minutes. So the leader of the church declared that those under the dominionship of his church would have to skip some days.
Hence, Gregory calendar came into existence which had only 19 days in September.
How would you feel if these many days go missing from the calendar!
Smrutirekha
