History of sundials

A sundial is a device that indicates time by using a light spot or shadow cast by the position of the Sun on a reference scale.

Ancient analemmatic sundials of the same era (about 1500 BCE) and their prototype have been discovered on the territory of modern Russia.

[16] A comic character in a play by Plautus complained about his day being "chopped into pieces" by the ubiquitous sundials.

Writing in c. 25 BCE, the Roman author Vitruvius listed all the known types of dials in Book IX of his De Architectura, together with their Greek inventors.

[citation needed] The Romans built a very large sundial in c. 10 BCE, the Solarium Augusti, which is a classic nodus-based obelisk casting a shadow on a planar pelekinon.

In Aristophanes' play Assembly of Women, Praxagora asks her husband to return when his shadow reaches 10 feet (3.0 m).

[citation needed] The oldest sundial in England is a tide dial incorporated into the Bewcastle Cross, Cumbria, and dates from the 7th or early 8th century.

A polar-axis sundial was constructed by the 14th century Arabic engineer Ibn al-Shatir, a replica of which still exists today, though he was not the inventor of the device.

[citation needed] The villages around Briançon, Hautes-Alpes, France were a major site of sundial production in the 18th and 19th centuries, with at least 400 painted dials in this one French department.

Among the most famous sundial makers of this era was Giovanni Francesco Zarbula, who created a hundred of them between 1833 and 1881.

The tower, tallest in the world when it opened in Taiwan in 2004, stands over 500 metres (1,600 ft) in height.

World's oldest known sundial, from Egypt's Valley of the Kings (c. 1500 BC), used to measure work hours. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ]
Hemispherical Greek sundial from Ai Khanoum , Afghanistan (3rd–2nd century BCE).
Chinese sundial of the Eastern Han dynasty (2nd century CE).
Sundial stone, Kilmalkedar , Ireland (c. 7th century CE).