Sundial - Sunwatch, Ansonia Clock Co, New York, c. 1923

Record summary

Held and catalogued by Museums Victoria, Melbourne (object number ST 19382), this is a sundial, made in United States, dated c. 1923. The Atlas places it in the Golden Age of Mechanical Watchmaking period (1900 – 1945) of its Instruments collection. Recorded dimensions: 7.5 cm (Length), 5 cm (Width), 1 cm (Height); 7.5 cm (Length), 5 cm (Width). The record is illustrated with 6 photographs.

Assembled from the source record's structured fields. Dates and attributions are given as the source states them; where a field is missing the Atlas leaves it blank rather than estimating.

Catalogue description

Atlas type guide

Sundials and solar time-finders

A sundial tells time from the position of a shadow cast by a gnomon or style. Because the sun's apparent motion depends on latitude, every fixed dial is laid out for a particular latitude, and portable dials either carry a latitude scale or are made for one region. Sundials show local apparent solar time, which drifts against mean (clock) time by up to about sixteen minutes over the year — the equation of time.

Portable dials were the pocket instruments of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Nuremberg and Augsburg workshops produced folding ivory diptych dials with inset compasses; English and French makers sold brass horizontal dials, ring dials and the Butterfield type; Japanese and Chinese makers had their own traditions of compass dials. After mechanical watches became reliable, dials remained in use for setting them, and nineteenth-century heliochronometers were built to correct directly for the equation of time.

General guidance written by the Atlas editors about this kind of object. It is not a statement about this particular piece; for that, rely on the source record above and on physical examination.

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