Mac Oglesby wrote: > 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
This design is, surely, exactly what we were here debating around February last year (see BSS Bull 2000.1 p 51, Mac's email of 28 Feb 2000). At that time, it was proposed to call it a Singleton dial. It now seems more appropriate to call it a Wright dial, if indeed Herbert Wright invented it. Chris Lusby Taylor Newbury, England 51.4N, 1.3W.
