Les Jones: The Cotsworth Calendar for Business

February 04, 2005

Economics > The Cotsworth Calendar for Business

This Slashdot article on a proposed simplifed calendar reminded me of the Cotsworth calendar. Cotsworth's idea was to have 13 months of 28 days each. That's 364 days. The extra day (which he called Silvester) was in December. The extra month (which he called Tricember) was between June and July.

One feature of the calendar is that the same date occurs on the same day of the week every year. And in fact, every month starts on Sunday the 1st and ends on Saturday the 28th. To make this work, Silvester wasn't assigned a day of the week. In other words, the day before Silvester was Saturday, and the day after Silvester was Sunday. Leap years were handled the same way.

The advantages for a business are enormous. Because you have the same number of days in a month:

Hourly employees make the same amount of money every month.
Factories have a constant number of production hours.
Bills for things like electrical usage are more consistent.
Balances are settled quicker, so there's a quicker turnover of money.
Consultants, attorneys, and anyone else who bills by the hour has a more predictable number of billed hours and billed services, because the number of work days is consistent (excepting holidays, which could be shuffled around). That solves a huge problem for a company like the one I work for that bills hourly rates for consulting services and contracts that are done during the Monday-Friday work week. Under the modern calendar different months vary in the number of workdays available to bill services, due to the differing number of days in each month and how many weekend days happen to be in the month.

George Eastman adopted the Cotsworth calendar for Kodak's internal calendar system. Chris Range was telling me that some Kodak cameras are marked with dates, and some samples show a date where the month is 13.

Posted by lesjones

Comments

The Cotsworth calendar kicks the C&T calendar's butt. Not only is one natural holiday per year preferable to a Newton Week every few years, Cotsworth would be fairly synchronized with the moon, so tides and such would be simpler to keep track of.

Posted by: hellbent at February 03, 2005

I got enough trouble just trying to get people to use UTC on their systems rather than local time. I cant imagine the problem getting them to use a different calendar.

Posted by: Frank Martin at February 04, 2005

Yeah, I don't see people switching anytime soon. Though for the reason hellbent points out it would be the perfect calendar for a base on the moon. :-)

Posted by: Les Jones at February 04, 2005

Yeah, I've been thinking for some years that this kind of thing would be better. Rational stuff doesn't always go over too well with humans though (we like fuzziness).

Posted by: aporitic at February 04, 2005

If I may engage in some geekitude: the Hobbits used a calendar with 30 days in every month, and they had 5 extra days that had unique names, like (I think) "Yule" in the middle of winter.

Posted by: Thibodeaux at February 04, 2005

i was thinking about this very idea this morning.

I decided that i do not like weeks, they are so regualar, my idea was just to mix everything the hell up, so that not one could figure out anything, and then we would just stop paying attention to time, and have more fun.

Posted by: cube at February 04, 2005

The Kodak month & date mark is usually 4 characters long, and the code is based on a fabricated word "CAMEROSITY". The letters stand for numbers 0-9. You can roughly tell the month and year of manufacture that way. A Brownie Hawkeye marked ACRM probably means it was made in November 1952.

I say probably, because as with most things there are exceptions. Kodak started the code around 1938. Sometimes the letters from the 40s to the 50s were reversed or used with numbers. Many products made from there until the 90s had it, but it wasn't always used consistently. I haven't seen it on any recent Kodak products at all. Neither of my Kodak Colorbursts have Camerosity codes, nor does my 1959 Retinette 1A which was one of the first Kodak SLR types. All of my other Kodaks have them. usually they are found inside the camera body when you open the door.

Posted by: Chris Range at February 04, 2005

I agree with you

Posted by: Paul at February 05, 2005

Napolean's revolutionary calndar is also an interesting read. His was inforced in his empire and is one of the few attempts at calendar fixing that was widely used.

Posted by: gunner at February 05, 2005