Get the time right.

NEW YORK, OCTOBER 30

THERE was no intellectual grand plan moving this little scenario. It happened that I was reading Harold Holzer's book on the Cooper Union address of one of our most revered presidents, Abraham Lincoln. That address was given in New York on February 27, 1860, and the author traces Mr. Lincoln's movements in the few days before the epochal speech. We learn that it took Lincoln three days to get from Springfield, Ill., to New York City, changing trains three times.

But it wasn't this that caught the reader's attention in terms of sheer indefensible anachronism. It was another datum, mentioned en route to Cooper Union. It was that the time in Pittsburgh was 13 minutes different from the time at the preceding stop, a few miles away.

We bump into these anomalies, poking about in American history. And they are not absolutely without foundation. What happened in America was that metropolises of robust size and self-assurance simply decided that when the sun was directly overhead, that time would be pronounced as noon in, say, Dubuque, the same process yielding times for noon at Miami and Phoenix. This gave rise to what one might call the Pittsburgh paradox, which afflicted Abraham Lincoln in his rescue mission for the United States.

Well, such inconveniences became first manifest, then intolerable. So America did the empirical thing, ordaining a uniform time over a specified area, corresponding with the sun's movements. Every sun-passage of 15 degrees at the equator justified one hour's difference in your watch. But instead of making official the differences between Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, the same time would hold sway over an entire hour's distance.

The challenge now is to move on from what is logical in local time, to what is logical in historical time. People 400 years ago ran into a theological iceberg--namely, that the calculation of the date of Easter was becoming removed from the secular calendar--which required modification to adapt a legacy of the Roman Empire to the facts of life. The astronomers who moved us from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar reasoned with the sun and the stars in their eyes. The Julian calendar was slightly too long, which over the centuries had led to a drift of ten days forward. The ten days were shaved off, and a new calendar formulated. But the accurate solar year is not divisible into an equal number of 24-hour periods, which gave us leap year.

Today's problem is the ongoing awkwardness of a calendar that refuses to give us stability regarding days of the week. Joe Jr. was born at noon on October 30, which was a Tuesday. But his birthday will be celebrated from year to year not necessarily on Tuesday, but on whatever day hits up on October 30.

The fixed-week calendar--in which every month begins on a Monday--would do away with this problem. It would also solve other problems. For example, the Gregorian calendar precludes regular divisions within the year necessary for accurate statistical comparisons. Half-years have an equal number of days only in leap years. The year never divides evenly into quarters; the months are irregular; and neither the year nor the months, except February, can be divided evenly into weeks.

The universal calendar was endorsed, in the early fifties, by members of both houses of Congress, but was killed by the Eisenhower administration, whose spokesman at the U.N., Henry Cabot Lodge, said that the American people simply hadn't demanded calendar reform. Right, and they haven't demanded other "reforms," which doesn't mean we should abandon the proposal to classify tobacco as a drug, or to stop spending money we haven't generated, or--all those other things.

--UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]