Leap Year Fun Facts: 10 Random Things You Didn't Know About February 29

Now that we know Leap Days are added because the actual time it takes the Earth to rotate the sun is 365.2421 days, we understand that, to ensure consistency with the true astronomical year, an extra day is added to the year in order to get the calendar back in sync with the movement of planet. So, every four years, an additional 24 hours is added to the month of February, creating this 29-day phenomenon and keeping the world spinning, right? But historically, leap days have become full of traditions, superstitions and random events. Here are some fun (or not so fun) facts that stood out:

1. Workers on fixed annual salaries have to work leap days for free: the rate does not account for an extra day. Same goes if you are sentenced to a year in jail, if your sentence lands in a leap year, you'll have to serve the extra day.

2. If you were born on February, you share a birthday with poet Lord Byron, composer Gioacchino Rossini, motivational speaker Tony Robbins, jazz musician Jimmy Dorsey, Lord Byron, actors Dennis Farina and Antonio Sabato Jr., rapper Ja Rule, and former Newcastle footballer Darren Ambrose.

3. According to the World Heritage Encyclopedia, the eighth premier of Tasmania, James Milne Wilson, was born on a leap day and died on a leap day in the 1800s.

4. The odds of being born on a leap day (also known as being a 'leapling') are 1-1461. The Guinness Book of World Records has listings of a family producing three consecutive generations born on February 29, and of the number of children born on February 29 in the same family.

5. In 1998, the town of Anthony in Texas, USA, declared itself to be the ‘Leap Year Capital of the World’. While the initial appeal for the title was said to be due to two members of its Chamber of Commerce being born leaplings, a Chamber member later made an honest admission that, “We just voted arbitrarily to name this as the Leap Year Capital of the World because no one else has.”

6. There’s even a Leap second! An extra second was added in June 2015 to bring the Earth’s rotation in line with the atomic time — the earth’s rotation is slowing down at a rate of 2,000th of a second per day. A similar addition in 2012 created a massive crash in services of Mozilla, Reddit, Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and the Linux Operating System and other programmes written in Java as their systems rely on precise timing.

7. As for Leap Years that have held huge eventualities: In1752, Benjamin Franklin proved that lightning is electricity. In 1876, George Armstrong Custer fought the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In 1848, gold was discovered in California. The Titanic sank in 1912. In 1960, on February 29, Hugh Hefner opened the doors to the first Playboy Bunny club on a leap day, "to long lines despite the bitter cold", according to Vanity Fair.

8. Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen got married on February 29, 2008, only a month after getting engaged. Greeks would have advised otherwise, but so far so good?

9. Married daughetrs in Taiwan traditionally return home during the leap month because they believe the lunar month can bring bad health to parents. Daughters bring pig trotter noodles to wish them good health and good fortune.

10. Frogs are the official mascots for leap year and leap day.