North American Sundial Society

It has been 17 years since 2001 when on September 11th terrorists attacked the world trade center and the Pentagon.  To memorialize this tragic event artifacts from the Word Trade Center are now in 1,100 cities, large and small, across the country that have received portions of the Trade Center wreckage from the Port Authority of New York. In Tampa along Bayshore Boulevard near Bay Boulevard is a striking memorial.  Here is a World Trade Center in miniature, represented as two tower outlines, matching the orientation and scale of the site in New York City.  Thin aluminum members rise from the memorial  base, tracing the placement, material, and proportions of the twin towers. The memorial is one one-hundreth the scale of the actual towers and site.  The memorial was dedicated on Friday, September 9th, 2011.

Interviewed by Fox 13 News of Tampa, John Thompson of Wilder Architect who designed the memorial explained, "So we put [the steel I-Beam from the Tower, setting] it standing straight like the column in the North Tower, symbolically."  Thompson continued, "The column for the World Trade Center acts as a sundial...There's a portion of concrete base that in the morning of September 11th when the shadow of the column hits that particular piece of concrete, that's the [time of] impact of the plane on the north tower.  As the morning carries on, when the column shadow falls off the concrete, that's when the building fell."  American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center at 8:46am.  After burning for 102 minutes, the north tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, killing approximately 1,400 people.

According the Fox 13 News, "It's a place where joggers stop to pray and groups stop to reflect, such as the Bayshore Patriots, an organization where members stand at its corner every Friday to wave the U.S. flag at commuters.  Thompson invites everyone to come out the morning of 9/11 and see the sundial."

Read more at:
http://www.fox13news.com/news/local-news/memorial-functions-as-a-sundial-tells-story-of-911#/
http://www.publicartarchive.org/node/54627
https://www.tampagov.net/news/city-tampa-dedicate-911-world-trade-center-artifact-memorial-be-installed-patriots-corner

The North American Sundial Society held their annual sundial conference in Pittsburgh, a four day affair for gnomonists to convene and share their enthusiasm for all things sundials.  This conference was special as the NASS celebrated the society's 25th anniversary.  Starting in 1993 with only a handful of dialing enthusiasts, the society has grown to over 250 members extending from North America to all parts of the globe.  For this conference NASS members convened from around the world representing countries of Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Australia.  Scheduled to attend but intervened by last minute issues preventing their attendance were dialists from Mexico and Italy.  All came with one objective - to share their enthusiasm for sundials.

On Thursday evening Aug 16th the dialists gathered at the Garden Hilton in downtown Pittsburgh to participate in drawings for assorted door prizes including sundials and books on dialing.  On Friday all boarded a charter bus to view the sundials of Pittsburgh, taking a tour that included a large steel equatorial designed and built by Anthony Vitale, a multi-faced dial at Old Economy Village dating to 1825, and a dial commemorating the battle at Bushy Run in 1793 that was found at the site of the Fort Pitt Block House during its 1894 restoration by the Pittsburgh Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution who still own and preserve the structure and the sundial. The tour included the dial at Frick Fine Arts Museum (near the geenhouse), the Riverfron Park Sewickley analemmatic (human) sundial, and the large octagonal horizontal sundial at Homewood Cemetery.

On Saturday and Sunday attendees listed to presentations on ring dials (with a diverson into the history of solving cubic equations), helical sundials (and 3D printing), viking sunstones (with a description of the birefracting material calcite), lunar sundials (Sciathericum Seleniacum), van Schooten and Dialing Scales (published in 1657), Time for Rita's (a vertical declining dial designed for an ice cream store in Elizabethtown, PA), and zenith days below the Tropic of Capricorn (and a year-long photograph of the analemma over the El Cerrito pyramid in Querétaro, Mexico),and much, much more.  On Saturday evening the Sawyer Dialing Prize was awarded this year to Gianpiero Casalegno from Italy for his achievements in harnessing modern ditital technology to the benefit of tradional dialists around the world.  The prize includes an elegant Spectra Sundial by Artisan Industrials (Jim Tallman) and a cash award.  Gian has chosen to given the cash award as a donation to the Bellingham Mural Project lead by Sasch Stephens. The dial will be dedicated on the coming equinox, Sept. 22.

NASS members enjoyed this year's conference and are now planning for next year's convening, tentatively to be held in Denver, Colorado.

The Van Vleck Observatory has received a new sundial. In the Wesleyan news letter article by Olivia Drake who interviewed provost Joyce Jacobsen who said, "Campus doesn’t have enough outside art. A sundial is a perfect piece because it’s not only aesthetically pleasing but it’s functional too.”   (https://newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2018/07/17/sundial-sculpture-installed-on-van-vleck-observatory/)

The 6 x 6 foot Muntz metal bronze sundial with stainless steel reinforcing weighing 650 pounds was carefully installed on the southern face of the 20-inch Clark Refractor dome on Foss Hill, Middletown, CT. The Alvan Clark telescope now open for public viewing was installed in July, 1922.  In 1971 the Van Vleck observatory acquired the 24-inch Perkin reflector, housed in a separate dome near the west end of the old observatory building. (http://www.wesleyan.edu/astro/van-vleck/history.html)

The July 16th, almost exactly 96 years since the installation of the Clark telescope, the dome was graced by a sundial.  Installation was supervised by the designer and creator, Robert Adzema (standing on the platform).  He visited the campus multiple times with paper and wooden models seeking the right esthetic design. The final dial design is a true south declining sundial (notice the equinox line is parallel to the ground) but the hour lines are corrected for the longitude 72° 39.5585' W such that mean noon occurs 9m 22s after local mean noon.  Hence a slight counter-clockwise twist to the hour lines (the 6am hour line is slightly below the horizontal). The shadow of the gnomon's tip traces the solstices and equinox.  "I wanted the design to look timeless and in keeping with the classical nature of the building,” said Adzema.  In Drake's article Adzema further commented on the patina of the bronze dial, saying, "I chose this green because it is the natural color bronze would oxidize over time. It is also a shade that looks great against the color of the observatory’s brownstone walls...The biggest difficulty was achieving the patina, which had to be applied by heating the surface of the dial and applying various chemicals and acids.”https://newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2018/07/17/sundial-sculpture-installed-on-van-vleck-observatory/

The Frederick Douglass home, also know as Cedar Hill, is located at 1411 W  Street, SE in Anacostia. After Douglass' death in 1895, his widow Helen Pitts Douglass (a suffragist and abolitionist) founded the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association in 1900. In 1916, the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs joined with the association and jointly owned the house until 1962.

One of the Colored Women's Clubs, the Married Women's Culture Club of Pittsburgh, contributed a sundial to the Douglass House in 1922 when it was opened as a national museum. The sundial contains a challenging motto: "My face marks the sunny hours.  What can you say of yours?"

According to an article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette by Mark Holan (http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/Op-Ed/2018/07/22/Marking-time-with-Frederick-Douglass/stories/201807220003) "The reasons that the Married Women’s Culture Club chose a sundial to donate to Cedar Hill are unknown. Having 'secured the dial and prior to sending it east for installation at the grounds,' the club held a July 9, 1922, dedication ceremony at Pittsburgh’s Euclid Avenue A.M.E. Church,' according to The Pittsburgh Press.... Just three Augusts after the Cedar Hill ceremony, more than 30,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue.  Even in the darkest of times, however, the Pittsburgh women’s gift of that sundial at Cedar Hill has marked the sunny hours."

You can read more about the history of the Douglass House and see a photo of the 1922 sundial at http://allenbrowne.blogspot.com/2012/09/cedar-hill.html  The photo taken by Allen Browne shows the dial has survived the years well, except that someone has reinstalled the gnomon backwards.