Doug & Willy, As I noted in The Analemmatic Sundial Sourcebook, with regard to the Brou analemmatic dial:
"... there is absolutely no written documentation that the dial existed from the beginning of the church, as the oral tradition would suggest. The earliest written mention of the dial did not occur until its appearance in a 1708 manuscript – long after Vaulezard's work. It would be extremely difficult to establish that the dial originated in the 16th century, since the dial as it exists today is actually the third incarnation of the Brou dial. It was completely redone in new materials and moved to a different site in 1757 by J.J. de Lalande, and was then moved back roughly to its original site and 'renovated' again in 1902." After collecting and reviewing every early publication I could find that covered the analemmatic sundial, the earliest mention I see of using a human as the gnomon is in Jacques Ozanam's 1694 edition of Recreations Mathematical and Physical. In this same work, Ozanam also points out that a person may be used in place of the gnomon on a traditional dial as well if placed correctly according to his height. Of course, there's also the ancient (Greek, Roman, Sicilian?) sundial resulting from measuring the length of one's own shadow and converting that, given the season of the year, into a time of day. Fred Sawyer On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 6:20 AM, Douglas Bateman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Any advice on the history of this type of dial will be appreciated. > > I have been contacted by a school project with the relatively simple > question, when did we start using the human as the gnomon? > > Setting aside 'pre-history' is it the more recent past? > > Regards, Doug > --------------------------------------------------- > https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial > > --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
