Abstract
THE late Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy, once received a letter requesting him to settle a dispute, which had arisen in some local debating society, as to which would be the first day of the next century. His reply was: “A very little consideration will suffice to show that the first day of the twentieth century will be January 1, 1901.” Simple as the matter seems, the fact that it is occasionally brought into question, shows that there is some little difficulty connected with it. Probably, however, this is in a great measure due to the circumstance that the actual figures indicating the century are changed on January 1, 1900, the day preceding being December 31, 1899. A century is a very definite word for an interval, respecting which there is no possible room for mistake or difference of opinion. But the date of its ending depends upon that of its beginning. Our double system of backward and forward reckoning leads to a good deal of inconvenience. Only the other day I was reading in a high-class scientific periodical (the Journal of the Astronomical Society of Wales), that the Athenian expedition under Phocion to succour Byzantium (attacked by Philip of Macedon) took place in B.C. 339, and that that was now exactly 2235 years ago.1 But it is evident that as there was no year o, and B.C. 1 immediately preceded A.D. 1, the interval from any date in a B.C. year to the same in an A.D. year is found not by simply adding the respective years, but by afterwards subtracting 1 from this sum. Our reckoning supposes (what we know now was not the case, but as an era the date does equally well) that Christ was born at the end of B.C. 1. At the end of A.D. 1, therefore, one year had elapsed from that event, at the end of A.D. 100, one century, and at the end of 1900, nineteen centuries.
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LYNN, W. The Last Day and Year of the Century: Remarks on Time-Reckoning. Nature 54, 438–439 (1896). https://doi.org/10.1038/054438a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/054438a0