George Washington was born on either Feb. 11, 1731 or Feb. 22, 1732 depending on which calendar you consult.
At the time, England and its colonies were following the Julian calendar , instituted in 46 B.C. by the eponymous Julius Caesar. By that calendar, Washington was born on Feb. 11, 1731. But in 1752, England switched to the Gregorian calendar, which is still in use today, and that threw everything off.
In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII put the Catholic world onto a new calendar, which bears his name. The Gregorian calendar has a leap year every four years except there is no leap year in years that are multiples of 100, unless that year is also a multiple of 400. This math which was impressively done before the invention of satellites and computers makes an average year 365.2425 days long, which is just 26 seconds off of NASA's calculation. Thus, the church that condemned Galileo in 1633 for saying that the Earth revolves around the sun had, more than 50 years earlier, produced a fairly precise measurement of the length of a solar year.
England was Protestant and took a little longer to adopt the Pope's calendar. It did so in two steps. First, it moved New Year's Day from March 25 to January 1, which advanced the calendar one year. Second, it cut 11 days out of the year to sync up with countries already on the Gregorian calendar. Thus, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 1752, was followed immediately by Thursday, Sept. 14, 1752, according to the National Archives in the U.K.
Washington's birthday was retroactively bumped up to 1732 to stay consistent with his age, and he celebrated his 21st birthday on Feb. 22, 1753. In doing so, he did not tell a lie the calendar date was different, but the Earth was in the same position it was when he was born.
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