Fabio;
That's a great sundial.
It looks like the date must have changed at noon.
That makes perfect sense as the beginning and end of each
day would be simple to witness, impossible to do at midnight.
However, that would be a difficult leap for societies who do
most of their activities from dawn to dusk. Imagine the time
keeping headache for payroll masters. Each person works two
days on a normal shift (morning and afternoon), and works on
two different shifts on each day (afternoon and following
morning)!
Maybe this is what confused Napoleon and caused him to delay
his attack at Waterloo.
Maybe it would make better sense to start and end days at
sunrise which is the start of the new day for most of us.
brent
Fabio Savian wrote:
Hi Roger,
about the French Republican system I've a message from Fabio Garnero (Saluzzo,
Cuneo, Italy, [email protected]).
The sundial you have reported shows the French Revolution time but it is a
modern sundial (1989).
This sundial www.sundialatlas.eu/atlas.php?so=IT2810 is on a building of the
XVII century and the sundial was built in the right time.
ciao Fabio
Fabio Savian
[email protected]
Paderno Dugnano, Milan, Italy
45° 34' 10'' N 9° 10' 9'' E
GMT +1 (DST +2)
Hi Brent,
If you were in charge of things, we could call you Napoleon. What
you are proposing is the French Republican system, the metric
system applied to time, 100 grad for a quadrant, 90 degrees, 10
hours a day, 100 minutes per hour, all totally rational. They even
produced clocks and sundials based on these rational, ok decimal,
systems. A few still exist. Here is my favourite example, a
Republican sundial with a relativistic correction. See
http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM7ETZ_Republican_Sundial_Les_Vigneaux_Vallouise_Hautes_Alpes_France
As this is a text message, paste the url into your browser to see
this fine sundial.
Regards, Roger Bailey
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