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Leap
Before I tell you what I’ve
found out about Leap Year
and its history, I’d like to
warn you. When I told my
editor that I’d write about
Leap Year I thought, “This
will be a fun and hopefully
interesting subject for the
interesting, I learned things
that I’d never known before
but there were times when I had to stop
reading about it and walk away. I’m going to
try and simplify it as much as possible, but I
won’t feel slighted if you need to put it down
and come back to it. Now that that is out
of the way, let me tell you a little about leap
years.
This year is election year. Wait, let
me start over…this year is a leap year. I
remember when I was growing up that if
it was leap year, then it was election year.
That has nothing to do with the meaning of
leap year, but I thought I throw that in there.
Leap year was instituted for a pretty basic
reason: to keep the calendar even with
the solar year. It takes the earth 365.2422
days to make one pass around the sun. It’s
the 0.2422 of a day that messes with the
calendar. This wouldn’t be a big deal if there
weren’t religious and seasonal celebrations
that need to occur on certain days on the
year. But there are. So, there had to be
some sort of system that could be used to
keep everything relatively close.
Calendar reform came during the time
that the Roman Empire was ruling. Roman
had taken to adding months to the calendar,
Year
by Jim Joplin
wherever they pleased and
for however long, to keep up
with the solar year. It was
sometime between 305 and
30 B.C. that the Egyptians
adopted a leap year system.
Cleopatra introduced the
leap year to her lover, Julius
Caesar, who instituted a
single year that was 445
days long, in order to realign
the calendar with the solar
calendar. The reformed calendar was
organized into 12 month and 365 days with
a leap year every four years, and was called
the Julian calendar.
Here’s where it gets a little bumpy. The
extra day that was added made it so that
every four years there was a discrepancy
of 11 minutes per year. What seems like a
minor issue, was actually making the Julian
So, Pope Gregory XIII, convinced by his
astronomers that the Christian holidays were
not being celebrated on the correct days,
introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582.
Pope Gregory decreed that only one out of
every four “century years” would include a
leap year. So, while 2000 and 2400 are leap
years, 2100, 2200, and 2300 are not.
There are three criteria that must be
met for a Gregorian calendar to be a leap
year. First, it must be evenly divided by 4.
Second, if it can be evenly divided by 100,
then it isn’t a leap year, unless – Third, the
year is evenly divided by 400, at which point
the year is a leap year. In the year 2000,
around the world.
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