Are You Sure That Calendar Is Right? Quiz

Answer: Gregory XIII

The Gregorian calendar was devised as a result of the increasing drift that was occurring between the date as given in the existing Julian calendar and the observed reality. This was due to the fact that the Julian calendar measured a year as 365.25 days, while the year is actually calculated as 365.2422 days. The church took a major interest in this, as the drift meant that the calculation of the date of Easter was becoming increasingly unreliable. The new calendar that was developed to correct this error saw a new procedure related to leap years - instead of a leap day EVERY four years, years ending in 00 would only be leap years if they were also divisible by 400 (meaning that 1600 would be a leap year, but 1700 would not).

In February 1582, Pope Gregory XIII, after whom the new version of the calendar was named, issued a papal bull called "Inter gravissimas" stating the intention to reform the calendar. To implement the new version, ten days had to be removed. This was set for October 1582; Thursday 4 October was immediately followed by Friday 15 October. The new calendar was immediately adopted throughout much of Catholic Europe, with France adopting the new calendar in December of the same year.

Answer: Sweden

Following its initial adoption in 1582 by Catholic Europe, the Gregorian calendar was gradually adopted in non-Catholic countries. Most adopted the same practice of simply dropping a number of days from the year. However, Sweden elected to undertake a more gradual process of reform by using its own, specially developed calendar, which would drop all leap days between 1700 and 1740 (a total of eleven days), which would bring Sweden into line with the Gregorian calendar. The plan, adopted in November 1699, was to be implemented from 1700 onwards, and consequently Sweden had no 29 February that year.

However, the same year Sweden became embroiled in the Great Northern War against an alliance of Denmark, Russia and other states. As a result of the war, the implementation of the new calendar was not done in either 1704 or 1708, leading to the calendar again becoming out of sync, as an extra day had been added. In 1712, King Charles XII of Sweden decreed that the Swedish calendar would be abandoned, and the country would return to the Julian calendar. To account for the extra day, the king also decreed that Sweden would have an extra leap day in February 1712, which led to 29 February being followed by 30 February. Sweden eventually adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1753.

Answer: Samoa

In the first years of the 1890s, access to the Samoan islands became a major area of conflict between the world's major powers, including the UK, USA and the German Empire. At the time, the islands, then an ostensibly independent kingdom, was located on the western side of the international date line, with its time zone set at four hours ahead of Japan, and thus almost a day ahead of the west coast of North America. But, the majority of Samoan trade was with the USA, so King Mâlietoa Laupepa, the ruler of the Samoan islands, was persuaded that, as a way to make the trading relationship easier, the islands should operate in a time zone that was closer to the United States.

As a result, Mâlietoa Laupepa ordered that Samoa would operate in a time zone that was three hours behind the Pacific Time Zone (making midday in Samoa the same as 3.00pm in California). The change was to take place the day after 4 July 1892, but, because this meant Samoa's time zone going back 24 hours, it meant that Samoa went through 4 July 1892 for a second time, leading to 1892 technically being a year of 367 days in the Samoan islands.

Answer: Excel

In computer engineering, system time is the passage of time as detected by a particular computer system, as measured by the system's internal system clock. However, although this runs concurrent to the normal passage of time, system time of a system will have a definite starting point, called the "epoch", which is usually 00:00 (midnight) on an arbitrarily selected date, with the clock measuring time from that point by the number of "ticks" that have passed since then.

When Microsoft introduced its Excel spreadsheet application in 1987, it utilised the same dating system as the then market leading spreadsheet program, Lotus 1-2-3; although the epoch in Lotus 1-2-3 was chosen as 31 December 1899, in order to save space and processing time in the program as it was designed, this was rendered as 0 January 1900. As this was utilised in Excel, it means that any date before 1900 will not appear correctly using Excel's dating function, but that 0 January 1900 will appear as normal. An additional mistake in Excel is that 1900 is set as a leap year, meaning that 29 February 1900, a date which does not exist, is also rendered correctly.

Answer: Channel Islands

Following the suicide of Adolf Hitler on 30 April 1945, his final testament had named Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor. However, the divided nature of the remaining German forces led to a realisation that any continuation of fighting was futile, and, on 8 May, an instrument of unconditional surrender was signed. However, this covered the German forces on mainland Europe, leaving German forces still ostensibly in control in various isolated pockets, largely on islands that had yet to be liberated. One significant group was the Channel Islands, a group in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy that formed the only pieces of British territory captured by Germany during the war. Following Hitler's death, a plan was implemented to bring about the liberation of the islands.

On the morning of 8 May, two Royal Navy destroyers, HMS Beagle and HMS Bulldog, sailed for the Channel Islands as the advance party of the liberation force. The surrender terms were presented to the German authorities and, at midnight, when the general ceasefire as a result of the overall surrender went into operation, the surrender of Guernsey was agreed and the two ships entered the capital, St Peter Port. The same morning, HMS Beagle sailed on to Jersey and accepted that island's surrender, with a force carrying a relief force, plus fuel and provisions for the islands sailing the same day. Since 1945, 9 May has been celebrated as a public holiday, Liberation Day, in the Channel Islands.

Answer: Hillary and Tenzing's successful ascent of Mount Everest

On 12 February 1953, an expedition led by Colonel John Hunt departed Tilbury headed for Nepal and a plan to try and reach the summit of Mount Everest. However, other members of the party arrived in Nepal from other parts of the world including Edmund Hillary, who was from New Zealand. Hunt's plan for an assault on the summit of the mountain was to create a number of pairs of climbers. On 27 May, the second of these pairs, Hillary alongside Tenzing Norgay, one of the local Sherpas in the party, set out. Two days later, at 11.30am, the pair became the first humans to reach the summit.

Following Hillary and Tenzing's return on 30 May, James Morris, a correspondent at "The Times" newspaper, sent a coded message containing the news by runner to the town of Namche Bazaar, from where it was transmitted by wireless to Kathmandu, and then onwards to London. The news was eventually released on 2 June, where it was described as a "coronation gift", as it was the same day as Queen Elizabeth II's coronation.

Answer: C.S. Lewis

President John F. Kennedy was shot at 12.30 CST in Dallas on 22 November 1963. The assassination of the US President thus became one of the major news events of the time, and led to other events that may have appeared in the news that day to be virtually ignored. Approximately an hour before Kennedy's death, the novelist C.S. Lewis, who wrote "The Chronicles of Narnia" series, who had been diagnosed with end-stage kidney failure only a few weeks previously in Oxford, while, seven hours after the assassination, Aldous Huxley, the British writer and philosopher, most famous for the novel "Brave New World", who had been suffering from advanced laryngeal cancer, died in Los Angeles.

The coincidence of the three men all dying on the same day led to philosopher Peter Kreeft writing the allegorical novel "Between Heaven and Hell", published in 1982, in which the trio all meet in Purgatory after their deaths, and engage in a discussion on the nature of faith, based around each of their seemingly differing views on Christianity.

Answer: United Kingdom

Bill Lear was an engineer who is perhaps most famous for founding the LearJet company, which designed an built a range of small business jets. After his sale of the company, he continued in the aviation business, producing a number of designs, the last of which was for the innovative LearAvia Lear Fan, a lightweight passenger aircraft with a "pusher" propeller design, with the propeller mounted at the rear of the airframe facing backwards. Lear intended to have a new production facility built for the aircraft in Belfast, and so approached the UK government for development funding. However, he died in 1978, before the prototype was ready - before his death, he asked his wife to continue with the project.

Funding for the project from the UK government had caveats, with one being that the prototype had to make its first flight on or before 31 December 1980 in order for the funding to continue. However, a flight planned for 31 December had to be cancelled owing to technical issues. These were resolved and the aircraft flew for the first time the following day, 1 January 1981. However, this one day slip was determined to not be sufficient to result in the funding being pulled, and so the date of the first flight was entered by UK government officials as 32 December 1980. Three aircraft were eventually built, but it never entered production, and the project was abandoned in 1985.

Answer: Sony PlayStation 3

On 1 March 2010, many users of original models of the PlayStation 3 games console found that error messages were appearing when they attempted to switch on their devices - initially thought to be an issue with the online Play Station Network, it soon became apparent that even users that had never connected their device to the internet had problems. One of the indications of a problem was that the internal clock had been reset to 31 December 1999. This suggested a bug somewhere within the system, which Sony identified on 2 March.

The issue came about from a bug in the Binary-coded decimal method of storing the date - this bug had misidentified 2010 as a leap year, and had tried to move the date forward from 28 February to 29 February, instead of 1 March. This led to the operating system on the console crashing. The initial fix was rolled out on 2 March, restoring the operation of PS3s around the world, with a patch correcting the bug sent out in June 2010.

Answer: Samoa

The Samoan islands had moved their time zone in 1892 to one that was three hours behind California. However, since the independence of the western of the two main islands in 1962, the nation found that an increasing amount of its trading was not with the USA, but the geographically closer nations of Australia and New Zealand. This caused issues similar to those of the 1890s, where Samoa and its main trading partners were separated by up to 24 hours. So, in May 2011, it was announced that Samoa would switch time zones, moving back to the one it used prior to July 1892. It did this by omitting an entire day from its calendar, with Thursday 29 December immediately followed by Saturday 31 December.

Unlike in 1892, rather than the entire Samoan archipelago moving time zone, it was only the independent nation of Samoa, consisting primarily of the islands of Upolu and Savai'i, that moved; American Samoa, an unincorporated territory of the USA, which consists of the main island of Tutuila and a number of smaller islands, remained in the old time zone. This has the effect of the two territories, which are geographically just one hundred miles apart, being separated by 24 hours of time.