Hello fellow sundial lovers--
The September issue of the Bulletin of the British Sundial Society contains (pages 127-9) an article by Herbert Wright detailing how he designed and constructed, while interred in a Japanese prison camp in Lunghua, China, a marble sundial which uses unfolded analemmas to display clock time. Mr. Wright overcame enormous obstacles in creating his dial, and it took him more than a year. The dial is dated 1944, as far as I can tell. I have a scanned image of the dial available upon request. It's an 80k JPG file.
Prior to seeing this article the earliest use of unfolded analemmas for EoT correction I had run across was a dial visited in Montreal during the 2001 NASS conference. A monumental equatorial sundial (1967) at the Planétarium de Montréal by Herman van der Heide, of The Netherlands, utilizes unfolded analemmas along its equatorial band. A nice touch on this dial is the use of different colors to aid the eye in following the date arcs. I have a 44k JPG file of this dial available upon request.
My questions to Sundial List members: Do any of you know of an earlier (than 1944) dial using unfolded analemmas to supply the EoT correction, or of early published material concerning this? Is it known who was responsible for discovering the principle?
Best wishes, Mac Oglesby Brattleboro, Vermont USA
