Sundial from the Pomeroy Class of 1927

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Published: 03 August 2019

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It is a small memorial sundial, only about a foot in diameter.  The polished bronze face has aged with time as have the students who gave that dial to the Pomeroy Seniior High School.  The sundial gifted by the graduating class of 1927 was placed on the front lawn of the school where it remained for more than 90 years.  According to a short article by Sara Hawley [https://www.mydailysentinel.com/news/42283/phs-sundial-has-new-home ] "Alumni remember that area as being 'out of bounds' to them as students.  They could never put their hands on the sundial - only viewing it from afar."

But now the school is no longer used and is being sold. The Pomeroy Alumni Association began to make plans to relocate their treasured sundial, "The sundial had previously survived several floods when it was located in front of the school. After looking at several locations, it was decided to place it on the foundation of the old bandstand in the Beech Grove Cemetery."

Remembering 9/11 at Tampa Memorial

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Published: 09 November 2018

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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, 2018.

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

Forest Park Memorial Dial

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Published: 09 November 2018

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On June 6th 2018, an interest memorial sundial was donated to the Clifford A. Phaneuf Environmental Center at Forest Park, MA just off U.S. 91 and a stone's throw from the Connecticut River.  According to Mass Live (https://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2018/06/new_sundial_at_forest_park_env.html), "During the public ceremony, the sculpted sundial was donated by the family of retired Hampden County Housing Court Judge Edward C. Peck Jr. and dedicated in memory of Peck's late wife, Ruth Mahoney Peck."  The Peck family commissioned sculptor James Kitchen who created a run-patina steel sundial with the base of an old mill circular saw blade and setting a pipe wrench and ice skate blade welded together as gnomon. According to Burt Freedman, a retired teacher of the Environmental Center for Our Schools at Forest Park, the dial provides references to the industrial and agricultural history of Springfield and Forest Park. 

The Hour Lines are short vanes of steel raised about 1" above the circular saw blade. A slight dome extends from the hour line circle to the center where the sundial gnomon sets.  Although the 6am-6pm line meets the base of the gnomon, the fact that the gnomon is raised 2 or more inches above the saw blade, sets the virtual foot of the gnomon far back of the 6-6 line.  Thus, although the sundial is esthetically beautiful and represents history of the area, perhaps it tells time with considerably more error than expected from the Equation of Time. [No longitude correction is provided, resulting in nearly 10 minutes of constant error.]

Arc of Memory

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Published: 26 May 2017

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A memorial, the Arc of Memory, will be completed in 2018 on the west side of the Garden of Provinces and Territories in Ottawa.  The design by Paul Raff's Sutdio is a "living calendar".  Raff described the memorial as a way to “honour the 8 million Canadians that can trace their origins to countries that suffered oppressive regimes of communism by creating an instrument of memory.”  In essence Raff is designing a huge digital sundial (or as he calls it, a "three dimensional calendar").   According to Erin Dommely of Azure Magazine,  the memorial is constructed of two curving walls 4 x 21 meters containing 4,000 short bronze rods arranged in 12 dense rows across a series of 365 stainless steel fins.  Erin describes the Arc of Memory's principle of having each rod uniquely angled towards the sun, whereby each hour of the day is illuminated each day of the year.

The two walls are split at the winter solstice and "On the darkest day of the year the design would invite visitors to step through in a metaphorical journey from darkness and oppression to lightness and liberty.”

Read more at: http://www.azuremagazine.com/article/memorial-victims-communism-design-revealed-ottawa/

Rochester Bicentennial Sundial

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Published: 08 March 2017

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Rochester, Michigan was settled in 1817 and is now celebrating its Golden Centennial with a sundial.  The city is on the northern outskirts of Detroit, with more than thirteen thousand citizens.  According to Natalie Broda, Rochester City Council approved $190,000 for the sundial, but the cost of the project is expected to exceed that due to the unstable, uncompacted ground that the heavy monument will sit on." The dial will be unveilled as part of the bicentennial homecoming envent scheduled for August 12, 2017.

Broda continues,""The sundial is the brainchild of Rochester’s city beautiful commission, which had been mulling the project over for several years according to Nik Banda, deputy city manager. The project was chosen after a request for proposals was sent out from city council." The sundial design was done by Russell Thayer, a sculpture artist from Franklin, Michigan.

The 20-foot tall gnomon of triangular cross section will be constructed with weathering steel, otherwise known as corten steel.  Broda notes that this material was chosen to pay homage to the steel used throughout the old knitting mills of historic Rochester.

aewinc.com describes the surrounding hour marks as part of "Twenty stones [each weighing over 1000 pounds] within and surrounding the plaza have been carefully sited to celebrate twenty decades of history. The decorative stones are indigenous to Michigan and have colors that complement the gnomon; they will serve as both seating and focal elements, as well as [hourly] time markers for the sundial. Historic plaques will be placed on the stones highlighting historic events which occurred during each of the twenty decades." To increase the historical retrospective, reclaimed 100-year old bricks from historic Main Street buildings will be used to complete the circular plaza around the sundial monument.

Washington Monument Sundial

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Published: 08 January 2017

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Today it is snowing in Washington DC and it brings to mind a winter some 43 years ago when the Washington Monument was turned into a sundial.  Over the years many have proposed turning this spiring monument into a sundial.  For example at the first North American Sundial Society (NASS) Conference in 1995 Robert Terwilliger drew a map of the shadow's excursion from Independence Avenue to E Street NW, repeated here at left. In June 2011 in the NASS Quarterly Journal The Compendium Robert Kellogg suggested that "...the precise shadow lines drawn in [Terwilliger's map] are precise geometrical constructs.  The problem is the sun is not a point source, but a disk about 1/2 degree in diameter.  The result is the sun casts a penumbral (partial) shadow when it is partially obscured, resulting in a range of light to dark sunlight that blurs the edges of shadow, making a gradient from light to dark.

To get a feeling for the impact of the penumbral shadow from the Washington Monument, we start with a brief summary of the Monument:   A competition was held in 1836 and won by architect Robert Mills who designed a tall obelisk.  Excavation began in early 1848 and the cornerstone was laid as part of the 4th of July ceremony by the Freemasons.  Lack of funds created a hiatus in construction in 1858, and finally the capstone to create a pyramidal point to the obelisk was laid December 6th, 1884. The obelisk as we see it today is 169.29 meters tall, 16.8 meters wide at the base and 10.5 meters wide at the start of the capstone pyramid.  The pyramid itself is 17m tall, with a small aluminum capstone at the tip and by the time the sun is sufficiently blocked by the top of the oblesk for us to see the shadow, the sun is well below the tip.

Read more: Washington Monument Sundial

Campbell University Sundial Commemorates Math Professor

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Published: 01 April 2016

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Mathematics professor Jerry Duncan Taylor passed away in 2013, but his 46 years of teaching lives on at Campbell University in Buies Creek North Carolina just south of Raleigh.   A commemorative sundial in front of Taylor-Bott Rogers Fine Arts Building was dedicated on Wednesday, March 21, 2016.

The highly polished dial, approximately 12 inches square, with an inclined bar gnomon sits on a plinth embedded in a low brick wall for all to see.  There are time marks for every 10 minutes, with standard time given as Roman numerals and daylight savings time one hour later given in larger Arabic numbers.  

Professor and mathematics department chair Meredith Williams recalled the start of his teaching career at Campbell: "I'm not sure I would have made it through my first semester without Dr. Taylor. I had an extremely challenging group of students in a class who were determined to see how hard they could push the new professor.  Dr. Taylor always had an encouraging word for me before I went to class."

Rachel Davis quoted Provost Mark Hammond from the sundial dedication (http://www.campbell.edu/news/item/sundial-dedicated-to-late-math-professor) "We wanted something physical that we could see, celebrate, and reflect on him and the good man that he is and the way he has touched many of the people here... [his] very inspired spouse, Louise Taylor, thought that perhaps we could memorialize Jerry through a sundial.  It gives us the time to pause and reflect and think about Jerry."

Southern Arkansas University Dedicates Sundial

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Published: 29 October 2015

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The large analemmatic sundial in front of the Harton Theater North Entrance of Southern Arkansas University (SAU) is being formally dedicated on Thursday, November 5th, 2016 in memory of the late David Thomas Smith, a 1957  SAU alum and  retired assistant director of the SAU Physical Plant.

The Smith Sundial, funded by family and friends of David Smith was built by the SAU Department of Art and Design and engineers of the SAU Physical Plant.  Patrick Finney was the construction supervisor and Steven Ochs was the project concrete art designer and craftsman.  As described in the NASS Sundial Registry, Dial #800 is "a 22 by 17 foot analemmatic dial of stained concrete with Arabic hour numerals of polished brass.  The dial perimeter and hour numerals are set in a blue decorative polymer "U" arc, appearing as a large mule shoe that represents the university Muleriders mascot symbol.  Dial colors represent the royal blue and gold school colors."

As reported by Southern Arkansas University, "The Smith Sundial at SAU is one of only four Arkansas sundials that are registered on the North American Sundial Society, and the only one outside of Little Rock and North Little Rock. It is also the only sundial in the state that is [a monumental] analemmatic..."

Read more at: https://web.saumag.edu/news/2015/10/28/sau-to-dedicate-smith-sundial-on-nov-5/