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In 1849 Auguste Comte (1798-1857) published his ‘Calendrier positiviste’. This is not the place to expound Comte’s positivist philosophy, save to say that it encompassed lofty sentiments for the progress and betterment of the whole of mankind along rational lines. His calendar was intended as a vehicle for the inspiration of the people and to be transparently simple. Formally it broke new ground by dividing the year into 13 months, each containing 28 days or four seven-day weeks; these accounted for 364 days. The remaining day (or two days in leap years) were complementary epagomenal days placed at the end of the year; they did not belong to any week, nor were assigned a weekday name.

— Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, E.G. Richards

One of the nice things about the positivist calendar is that each day is dedicated to a particular person from history, ranging from Prometheus at the start of the year, all the way to Gall (a pioneer of neuroanatomy) at its end. This is also one of the reasons that few people other than Comte and his positivist friends took it seriously. Less fanciful attempts to reform the calendar have often failed, so Comte’s positivist calendar never stood a chance. These days it’s nothing more than an amusing historical footnote, which is a pity because even though it’s kind of ridiculous, it would be nice to live in a world where I could refer to today’s date as “Friday 19th Bichat, the day of Berthollet in the month of industry.” (That’s Marie François Xavier Bichat, an 18th Century French anatomist, and Claude Louis Berthollet, French chemist who helped devise modern chemical nomenclature.)

Obviously something had to be done. You can view the positivist date here. You can also download the source of the python script.

Gunson looked up to see a breach appearing in the top of the dam. Feeling a sudden, violent, vibrating of the ground beneath his feet, he quickly scampered up the side of the embankment, luckily just in time, as a few seconds later there was a total collapse of a large section of the dam, unleashing a colossal mountain of water which thundered down the valley and on to the unsuspecting population below. For two hundred and fifty people who lived in Sheffield and the hamlets in the valley below the dam, this was to be their last night on Earth. Six hundred and fifty million gallons of water roared down the Loxley valley and into Sheffield, wreaking death and destruction on a horrific scale.

Mostly forgotten today, the bursting of the Dale Dyke Dam resulted in the worst man-made flood in British history. Samuel Harrison’s detailed account, A Complete History of the Great Flood at Sheffield, was written in the months after. The damage went far beyond the immediate toll on life and a special act of parliament resulted in one of the largest compensation claims of all time. Claimants ranged from servants whose gardens were ruined to an author and publisher whose autobiography was swept away. Even the army claimed for damages to Hillsborough Barracks, where the waters breached three-foot thick walls and drowned two of the Sergeant Paymaster’s children.

[crossposted from MetaFilter]