11 Days that Never Were

September 3, 1752 – Today was the day that never happened…at least not in Britain.  That’s because this was the day that the British made the jump from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar.

Pope Gregory XIII, the guy the calendar is named for.

The reason for the change was that the Julian calender (introduced by Julius Caesar) was like a bad wristwatch.  It assumed that a year was 365.25 days long.  In order to stay on track a leap year was thrown in every 4 years with 366 days.  The only problem was – a real trip around the sun takes 365.2422 days.  This minor difference gets magnified over a few centuries and after a while you start to see the months getting out of sync with the actual seasons.

The Gregorian calendar offered a more accurate solution that fine-tuned the occurrence of leap years.  The correction required that century years (like 1800, 1900, 2000, etc) could only be leap years if they were divisible by 400 (instead of 4).  That means the years 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not.

In order to make the transition to this new math, Londoners in 1752 would have to skip September 3rd through the 13th and go straight to the 14th.  So according to the historical record, for those eleven lost days nobody was born and nobody died.

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The Carrington Event

September 2, 1859 – The biggest geomagnetic storm in recorded history slammed into the earth on this day.

Carrington Event as recorded by Kew Observatory in London.

It’s also known as the Carrington Event after British Astronomer, Richard Carrington.  He was watching the sun when he saw an unbelievably large solar flare.  The cosmic blast headed straight for the earth and arrived in only 17.5 hours.

Brilliant aurorae were seen all across Europe and North America.  The shimmering, dancing lights in the night sky were so bright that miners in the Rocky Mountains woke up and started making breakfast at 2 in the morning.  They thought the sun had already come up.

It looked pretty but the power-packed space waves also wreaked havoc.  Telegraph poles sparked and burst into flames.  In some areas the telegraph operators realized that they were still able to send and receive messages, even though their batteries had been blown out or turned off.

The following is a transcript from September 2, 1859:

Boston operator (to Portland operator): “Please cut off your battery [power source] entirely for fifteen minutes.”

Portland operator: “Will do so. It is now disconnected.”

Boston: “Mine is disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?”

Portland: “Better than with our batteries on. – Current comes and goes gradually.”

Boston: “My current is very strong at times, and we can work better without the batteries, as the aurora seems to neutralize and augment our batteries alternately, making current too strong at times for our relay magnets. Suppose we work without batteries while we are affected by this trouble.”

Portland: “Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?”

Boston: “Yes. Go ahead.”

Scientists believe that geomagnetic storms like this have hit the earth about every 500 years.  Smaller events came our way in 1921 and 1960, and those resulted in major disruptions of power and phone systems.

If an event as large as the blast of 1859 were to hit the earth today, one can only imagine the turmoil it could cause due to our greatly increased reliance on eletrical grids and satellite communication.

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Last of Her Kind

September 1, 1914 – The last passenger pigeon died on this day.  Her name was Martha and she lived in the Cincinatti Zoo.

Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons.

Upon Martha’s death the zookeeper froze her inside a block of ice and shipped her off to the Smithsonian.  That’s where she’s been ever since, but she’s not currently on display.

The extinction of the passenger pigeon is one of the most disturbing examples of just how destructive humans can be to other species.  It wasn’t too long ago that the passenger pigeon made up more than 25% of the total bird population in the United States.  Early settlers wrote about their massive migratory flights that would blacken the sky.  Amazingly, by 1900 there were none to be found in the wild.

One of its closest relatives is the mourning dove, but passenger pigeons were larger and more colorful.  They depended on vast forests to provide roosting areas in which they could congregate in huge numbers.  When they migrated, the parade of passing birds would sometimes last for days.

The beginning of the end for the passenger pigeon was in the 1800s when professional hunters started trapping and killing the birds for food.  They were easy to catch in big groups using nets.  One popular nesting area in Michigan saw 50,000 birds killed every day over a 5-month period.

By the 1880s people started noticing that the passenger pigeons were disappearing.  Some futile attempts were made to protect and rebuild the population, but farm-raised passenger pigeons were never good at breeding in captivity.

Once Martha was gone, that was the end of it.

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