SOURCE: “Changing the Calendar,” in Eighteenth Century Life, Vol. VII, No. 2, January, 1982, pp. 1-18.

In the following essay, Alkon comments on eighteenth-century attitudes toward time and changes in the calendar.

In January 1796, Neville Maskelyne, astronomer royal at Greenwich, fired his assistant, Kinnebrook, charging him with an observational error of eight-tenths of a second. Kinnebrook's difficulty had started the previous August when his notations of stellar transit times began to differ by one-half second from those of Maskelyne, whose admonitions were to no avail, and whose patience was exhausted four months later upon seeing the discrepancy grow by another three-tenths of a second. To Maskelyne it was clear that Kinnebrook was incompetent for scientific work in a world whose timekeepers depended for accurate calibration upon observations which, so it then seemed, should be accurate to well within half a second. To historians, Kinnebrook's problem, now so famous in the...