Instruments · Sundial
Sundial, Sweden, 1945
- Maker / attribution
- Unrecorded in source
- Date
- 1945
- Historical period
- Modern Mechanical Horology (1945 – 1969)
- Country of origin
- Sweden
- Place
- Sverige
- Object type
- Sundial
- Materials / technique
- Skiffer
- Dimensions
- Bredd 20 mm
- Holding institution
- Skelleftea museum
- Accession / object no.
- skm_item_8336
- Credit line
- Skelleftea museum
- Catalogue title (original)
- Solur (Swedish)
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Record summary
Held and catalogued by Skelleftea museum (object number skm_item_8336), this is a sundial, made in Sverige, Sweden, dated 1945. The Atlas places it in the Modern Mechanical Horology period (1945 – 1969) of its Instruments collection. Materials and techniques recorded by the source: Skiffer. Recorded dimensions: Bredd 20 mm. The record is illustrated with 1 photograph.
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
Catalogue description from Skelleftea museum
Ett solur av skiffer, tillverkat 1945 av Sven O Renlund. Hans far var präst och de bodde i Brunnsgården Skellefteå landsförsamling. Föremålet hittades av några pojkar 1962 och såldes till Skellefteå museum för 16:- enligt verifikat 84/62. Solur i skiffer från Brunnsgårdens trädgård.
Shown in the original language of the source catalogue. An editor-reviewed English translation has not yet been published; we do not publish machine translations as authoritative text.
Historical context
Modern Mechanical Horology (1945 – 1969)
Tool watches for divers, pilots and astronauts; electric watches anticipate the electronic age.
Electronic instruments, quartz frequency standards and the first atomic clocks transformed precision timing in laboratories and broadcasting.
Read the period in the timelineMore instruments from this periodEarlier: Golden Age of Mechanical Watchmaking
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.
What to look for
- The latitude engraved on the dial plate or a latitude arc on the gnomon — it shows where the dial was meant to be used.
- The type of hour lines: equal (equinoctial) hours, Italian or Babylonian hours counted from sunset or sunrise, or unequal temporal hours on early and Islamic instruments.
- An inset magnetic compass and whether a magnetic-declination mark is drawn on its card — a useful dating clue because declination changes over time.
- Maker's signatures and town marks: Nuremberg compass-makers (Kompassmacher) often struck a personal mark and the town's punch.
- Additional scales such as lunar volvelles, wind roses, perpetual calendars or lists of cities with their latitudes.
Dating clues
- Ivory diptych dials are characteristic of Nuremberg between about 1500 and 1700.
- Butterfield-type dials with a bird-shaped adjustable gnomon point to Paris workshops from the late seventeenth century onward.
- Equation-of-time tables engraved on the plate became common after the mid-seventeenth century, once pendulum clocks made the difference between solar and mean time obvious.
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.
Read next:The history timeline
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