Gardom's Edge Monolith

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Published: 09 April 2012

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Gardom Edge Monolith [photo courtesy of Dan Brown, Nottingham Trent University]

A two meter standing stone at Gardom’s Edge may be an astronomically aligned monolith set up during the Neolithic period 2,500 – 1,500 BCE to recognize the summer solstice.   According to Dan Brown, Andy Alder and Elizabeth Bemand of Nottingham Trent University, “Such an astronomically aligned stone could be described as a seasonal sundial … However it is not intending to mark local time during a day or measure exact dates during a year.  Rather the seasonal shadow casting allows for the display of cosmological knowledge such as the ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’ of the Sun”…

The upward facing north slope of the stone remains in shadow until near the time of Summer solstice.  Today the stone points south at an upward tilt of 58.3° +/- 2.9°, seemingly aimed at the highest rise of the summer sun, computed for the Gardom Edge latitude of 53.26° as 60.7° in Neolithic times.

Read more: Gardom's Edge Monolith

Pantheon Sundial

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Published: 02 August 2011

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One of the most iconic buildings in the world, the Pantheon in Rome is an enduring testament to the power and glory of ancient Rome.  At the same time, it has also always posed something of a mystery.  The only source of natural lighting is a thirty-foot diameter hole at the very top of the hemispherical dome, often referred to as the "oculus".

Working since 2009, scholars Guilio Magli and Robert Hannah discovered that at midday on the equinoxes, a shaft of circular light shines through the oculus and illuminates the Pantheon's entrance. 

Read more: Pantheon Sundial

Early Astronomers

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Published: 13 March 2011

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[photo credit: Andrew Caswell and Robert Cockburn of The Daily Telegraph ]

Ask a person what is the earliest evidence of humans building structures to mark significant celestial events, and one offer "Stonehenge".  But there may be a structure built thousands of years early according to some experts in Australia.

A site "down under", name Wurdi Youang, estimated to be older than 10,000 years, has a strange arrangement of stones with alignments toward solstices and equinox that has been scrutinized by several eminent Australian scientists.  They conclude that the placement and alignment of the stones is not an accident and there is a perfect alignment with the setting sun on the mid-summer day. Understandably, the exact location of the site is a well-guarded secret, but it is known to be west of Melbourne approximately 80 kilometers.

Indiana French Dial Found

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Published: 27 August 2022

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Smithsonian Collection - Pocket sundial by Bourgaud of Nantes, 1660–1675. (MA.325565)

From the National Museum of American History is an article about "How did a French pocket sundial end up buried in a field in Indiana?" published 20 July 2022 by Kidwell & Schechner.  

It started in 1860 when Dr. Elisha Cannon, while plowing a field in Indiana, came across a strange object. It was a French Butterfield sundial. It ended up in the Smithsonian collection 100 years later, where it quietly sat until recently when curator Peggy Kidwell wanted to learn more. She contacted Dr. Sara Schechner, David P. Wheatland Curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University, to join the investigation.

The dial is inscribed "Bourgaud Nantes" showing it was from the workshop of a clockmaker in Nantes, France. As with all Butterfield dials it contained a magnetic compass with declination corrections for orienting the dial to north and a miniature plumb bob to hold the dial level. The gnomon support is in the traditional shape of a bird allowing the gnomon itself to be adjusted to a range of latitudes. Look closely at the chapter ring of hour marks in Roman numerals.  Outside the numerals is one hour line scale and on the inside of the numerals is a second scale.  The user could approximate the time between these two scales, done for the extreme latitudes 30 and 55 degrees.

"In her research on sundials in the American colonies, Schechner has drawn attention to several of these dials, and notes that some 18th-century French sundial makers, like Pierre le Maire (and his son of the same name), made pocket dials that carefully listed the latitude of places of French interest in both North and South America." How did the dial end up in Indiana? It could have been carried there by Dr. Cannon and his wife Gulielma, Quakers who in 1840 left North Carolina, finding that "living in a state where African Americans were legally enslaved was intorable." Or the dial may have been left a century earlier when the French occupied much of what is now Indiana, leaving outposts such as Terre Haute and possibly a lost sundial.

Read the article: https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/pocket-sundial

Hudson Valley's Missing Sundial

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Published: 04 March 2021

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This article is reproduced by permission from Hudson Valley on-line magazine of Feb 17,2021 and can accessed directly at https://hvmag.com/life-style/history/missing-sundial-hudson-valley-hillside-dean-sage/  It was written by Jonathan Ortiz with information from NASS/BSS member Martin Jenkins and fellow researcher Kevin Franklin.

Virtual Tour of Jantar Mantar Solar Observatory

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Published: 07 May 2020

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Google Arts and Culture offers you to take a virtual tour of the 13th century observatory Jantar Mantar in Delhi. At the opening view (see the website link below), the Google tour explains: "Innovations in architectural astronomy: The Jantar Mantar Obervatory, Delhi's outdoor astronomical observatory is the earliest of five observatories built by Sawai Jai Singh II across India. It is dominated by a huge sundial and houses other innovative instruments that help plot the course of heavenly bodies...."

"The Maharaja designed four similar observatories in Jaipur, Ujjain, Mathura and Varanasi to help and improve upon the studies of space and time. The Jantar Mantar in Jaipur is now the largest among them." Google gives us a glipse of the large equatorial dial of the Man Singh Observatory in Varanasi and then focuses on the four large brick and plaster instruments at Jantar Mantar: the Ram yantra, two circular structures next to each other used to observe celestial objects; the Samrat yantra, one of the largest equatorial dials in the world with stairs leading to the top of the triangular gnomon (looking like stairs to the heavens) and surrounded by a large equatorial band to measure solar time; the Jai Prakash yantra that consist of two elaborate sunken hemispheres so large that there are stairs from the bottom leading between huge longitudinal bands; and the Misra yantra, which is shaped like a heart and is composed of five different sun and alignment instruments to determine the shortest and longest days of the year at the solstices.

Take a personal visit to these historic astronomical and solar instruments at: The Jantar Mantar Observatory - Google Arts & Culture

Harvard Collection of Diptych Sundials

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Published: 15 December 2019

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From the Harvard Gazette - Dec 9, 2019 : "Since 1672 Harvard University has been acquiring scientific instruments for teaching and research. In 1948 the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments was established...[and has] grown to more than 20,000 objects making it one of the three largest university collections of its kind in the world"

As an illustration of the collection is a photograph of ivory pocket sundials shown here, made in Nuremberg, Germany between 1575 and 1645. These elegant diptych sundials represented the 16th and 17th century equivalent of pocket watches, especially for wealthy traveling merchants to keep track of time. "Harvard has the largest collection of sundials in North America, a gift of David P. Wheatland, Class of 1922."

As described by Dr. Sara Schechner in Time of Our Lives - Sundials of the Adler Planetarium who is the David P. Wheatland Curator of Historical Instruments at Harvard describes the diptych as "fashioned from ivory, gilt brass, carved wood, and wood covered by printed paper. The materials offer hints on the social status of their owners. So too do common and novel accessories found on the instruments. A directory of cities and their latitudes suggests an owner who traveled... The association is stronger when the diptych combines a gazetteer with particular sundials that found the time according to the sundry conventions of England, France, Germany, and Italy. A merchant crossing a border would have needed to know how to set up an appointment with his clients. How many hours would there be to transact business or to journey along the road? Calendrical devices on the diptych showed him the length of the day and night throughout the year...[and] the diptych's lunar volvelle gave ...the moon's phase. It also assisted the owner in finding the time by moonlight...[And] a diptych with a magnetic compass [allowed proper and immediate orienting the sundial]."

Read more at: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/12/collection-of-historical-scientific-instruments-continues-to-amaze/

Mystery of 1733 Sundial

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Published: 06 April 2019

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It started simply enough. Keith, a "treasure hunter" reported finding a 1733 sundial "in the Carolinas". (http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/my-best-finds/603181-1733-colonial-sundial-found-restored.html). The brass sundial about 5 or 6 inches in size was found crumpled and apparently had a number of modern attempts to solder a gnomon back onto the dial plate. Kieth reported, "When I found the piece it had been bent and damaged so I sent it to an expert in restoring metal objects....It has been the best find of my relic hunting career. I hope to get some detailed info from people who know about sundials."

The dial is done in the English style of the period, that is to say, the dial is cut as an octogon with a circular chapter ring with Roman numerals and delineated on the outside to the quarter hour. In the center is an 8-point compass rose with the cardinal points labelled "N,S,E,W". Four crude and somewhat modern screw holes held the dial to some modern base. The maker's initials D.D.M. are berlow the engraving of the original owner "Walter * Lane" with the date 1733.

As Kieth notes, "[The dial] is one of the earliest from southern colonial America". But the problem is where? The engraved latitude is "Latt: 34:30". Using Serle's ruler confirms that the delineated hour lines are between 34 and 35 degrees. That should allow a quick check of southern cities to identify the home of this dial. The center of population in the 1750's was Willmington, NC at 34:14. If we assume that William Lane was a farmer a person of means, then two possibilities arise: Blenheim SC and Laurens SC both at 34:30. Laurens County, in particular, was in the area where thousands of immigrants, mainly Scottish and Irish, settled in the pre-revolution Carolinas. Then there is Kershaw SC at 34:32 which was settled around 1732 by English traders and farmers who moved inland from Charleston. What was the provinance of this dial? We may never know, but you can search the below 1755 map from University of North Carolina library of historic maps for towns and river portsat: https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ncmaps/id/123

NEW INFORMATION:

A descendent of Walter Lane sent the following:  Walter Lane lived in New Bern, Craven County, North Carolina.  Apparently he left Maryland in the 1720's and by 1726 showed up in records of Craven County.  In 1729 he was listed as a Commisioner of New Bern, and probably a person of means.  The sundial could very possibly be his.  Looking at the map below, New Bern is just north of latitude 35 degrees on the mouth of the Neus [Neuse] river.  If we accept the latitude of the dial as 34:30, Walter lived about 35 miles south of New Bern, perhaps on a farm near Wilmington, S.C.  Old records show that much of South Carolina in 1734 was considered Craven County.