A note from the designer
People often ask what is so special about the Spot-On Sundial and
how it came to be designed. If you too are interested in this, here
is the full story!
I have been interested in sundials for 25 years or more, ever since
I attempted to make a sundial from a vertical post stuck in the
ground and found it didn't work (more
details). Later, when I found out why it didn't work from a
book in the library, I started making painted wooden sundials (more
details).
A few years later, a friend suggested I should join the British
Sundial Society, and at the following Annual General Meeting,
I made a suggestion for organising a periodic Awards
Scheme. At the end of that meeting, I was invited to join the
Council with responsibility for setting up the scheme.
In 1996, I had become very interested in the Internet, and suggested
that the British Sundial Society should set up an information site
about sundials. At that stage in the development of the Internet,
it was not at all clear how much money a website would cost and
what benefits it would bring, so the idea fell on stony ground.
So I decided to set up www.sundials.co.uk
on my own account, and it has subsequently become the leading world
internet site on sundials.
For many years, I and others in the world of sundials, have been
concerned with one major problem - "Why are garden sundials so awful,
and what on earth can be done to improve them?" Why they are so
awful is fairly easy to answer - it is very easy to make something
which looks like a sundial and to sell it as a garden ornament to
people who are not really interested in whether it works as a sundial.
(Such sundials can now be imported by the container load from the
Far East at a price of £3 (about $5 or E5) each. These objects should
not really be dignified with the name of sundials, because they
are not capable of telling the time from the sun. (In addition,
many of them are badly made, and very few come with any instructions
on how to set them up).
In the year 2000, my wife very kindly took me on a bus tour of
Guatemala, and, in between seeing the extensive Maya ruins and enjoying
the spectacular scenery and friendly people, we had a certain amount
of time waiting around for buses. Deprived of both computer and
workshop, I started thinking about the garden sundial problem, and
came up with an idea - a split gnomon would remove the difficulties
in setting up a horizontal sundial, and, if it was well made and
had good instructions with it, it could also be very accurate. Also,
I thought, it would provide a good opportunity to branch away from
the traditional designs, which are usually feeble echoes of seventeenth
or eighteenth century dials, and to produce a clean modern design
appropriate to the century we live in.
Thinking these ideas is the easy bit! The difficult part is putting
them into practice. I very nearly gave up, because it seemed that
they were going to be impossibly expensive to make, and would thus
never get any orders. And then I had a stroke of luck - I met somebody
who imported goods from India, and had an agent there, and he put
me in touch with a company near Delhi who, after three prototypes,
produced a high-quality product at a price which would make it possible
to sell in European markets.
The rest is history - we have so far (2003) sold 300 Spot-On brass
sundials, and the new stainless steel Spot-On sundial is attracting
a lot of interest from England, Europe, and North America.
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