01/18/1967
Our present calendar is cockeyed, in the opinion of Christian Jan Schlusing, an architect.
With that thought in mind he has come up with a "world calendar" which he says need never be changed and will be perpetually accurate.
Mr. Schlusing said he will offer his calendar lo the United Nations with the hope it will be adopted by every country, thus contributing to uniform measurement of time and to world understanding and peace.
THE SCHLUSING calender consists of two six-month periods with what he calls a "solar week" sandwiched between.
The six-month periods hove 180 days each, a total of 360 days. The solar week has five days, making a 365-day year, with an added day, Saturday, to be used when and if needed as Leap Year day.
Actually , Mr. Schlusing avers , the Leap Year day would not be needed, once time is measured scientifically."
He contends his calendar then would be self-adjusting" to any fractional time changes needed to keep track of the earth's annual journey around the sun.
IN CONTRAST to the existing calendar, the Schlusing world calendar has 30-day months and six-day weeks, there being no months with 31 days and no weeks with seven days. Days of the week would fall on the same days of the month the year round, Sunday, for example, would always be on the first, seventh, thirteenth, nineteenth, and twenty-fifth of the month.
Friday would never fall on the thirteenth, sparing people a lot of anxiety about bad luck.
To achieve a six-day week inventor Schlusing does away with all Wednesdays. This raised a question: How would churches observe Ash Wednesday?
"Just call it Ash Tuesday," said Mr. Schlusing. "All previous calendars have been inaccurate anyway.
"There exist enormous discrepancies in accounting for the passage of time. So much so that varying arbitrary dates have been employed for personal, political and ecclesiastical reasons.
"GEORGE WASHINGTON'S birthday (which he doesn't change) is Feb. 22, according to the Gregorian calendar we now use. But he was born when the Julian calendar, which was different, was used, "Between the 'years' A.D. 400 and A. D, 1400 there apparently was no calibrated time, no significant evidence
of a beginning or end. For all we know, we may now be living in the 10th Century!"
Easter, which moves about on the present calendar, would always fall on Sunday. April 13, by Mr. Schlusing's calendar. Christmas would always come on Sunday, as would New Year's Day.
FOR HIS SIX-DAY week, he envisions four working days of nine hours each, or a 36-hour week, with Sundays and Saturdays off. There would be no holidays in the four-day work week, but everybody except essential workers could take off during solar week, he explained.
Among the many advantages Mr. Schlusing attributes to his calendar are: It would simplify auditing, provide five working weeks every month and five pay days, permit weekly publications to have 60 issues a year instead of 52, and be so uncomplicated that a child could learn it in the primary grades.
Mr. Schlusing said he has been working on his calendar for two years, but got interested in the idea as a boy, when he saw his father invent what he called a "century calendar." It had a sliding device to determine on what day any date fell.
"MY CALENDAR is so simple it would be ridiculous not to adopt it," he said. "The only people it would hurt would be the calendar manufacturers. Mine would never have to be changed."
Mr. Schlusing plans for his world calendar to become effective when there is another Jan. I that falls on a Sunday, as it did this year. That won't happen again until 1978, he says and in the next 11 years the world will have time to see the advantages of his calendar and adopt it.
Comments