Horizontal Sundial
date: label: date made
content: after 1773
name: label: maker
content: Colles, Christopher
notes: label: Description
content: This sundial was made by Christopher Colles (1738?-1816), an Irish immigrant surveyor and inventor. Colles has received credit for the first American steam engine, publication in 1789 of the first American road atlas, the country’s first semaphore telegraph system in 1813 and his visionary proposals for canals and waterways. Colles established a scientific instrument business in New York in the mid-1780s, and this sundial was one of his products.
label: Description
content: This dial, mounted horizontally, shows the hours at a fixed location, in contrast to a portable pocket dial a traveler might carry from place to place. The copper octagonal plate is pierced by eight holes for fastening it to a base and four more holes for attaching the gnomon (not original), the slanted part of the dial that casts the shadow. The plate is engraved, from the center to the edges, as follows: “C. Colles/fecit/42 Pearl”; a central compass rose; indications of latitude, longitude, noon and midnight: “Lat 40o, 40’”, “Lon 74o W of London” and “N is Noon”/“M is Midnight”; a table showing the equation of time for setting mechanical clocks; the corresponding time at major world cities at noon or midnight in New York; Chapter ring with Arabic hour numerals and marks for half hours and minutes; and a Latin inscription, sometimes found on other sundials, that reads “Me ortum vides forsan non occasum” (“You see me [the sun] rise, but perhaps you shall not see me set”).
label: Description
content: Other sundials by Colles survive in museum collections at the New-York Historical Society and Van Cortlandt Manor, Historic Hudson Valley. An oil portrait of Colles by James Frothingham is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
label: Description
content: See also: Bathe, Greville. <i>An Engineer’s Miscellany.</i> Philadelphia: Patterson and White, 1938.
label: Description
content: Colles, Christopher. <i>A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America, 1789.</i> Edited by Walter W. Ristow. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1961.
label: Description
content: Koeppel, Gerard. <i>Water for Gotham: A History.</i> Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
label: Description
content: Popper, Deborah Epstein. “Poor Christopher Colles: An Innovator’s Obstacles in Early America.” <i>The Journal of American Culture,</i> 28(June 2005): 178-190.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: United States: New York, New York City
setName: label: See more items in
content: Work and Industry: Mechanisms
label: See more items in
content: Measuring & Mapping
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: ME.334118
label: catalog number
content: 334118
label: accession number
content: 306559
objectType: label: Object Name
content: sundial
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: brass (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: copper (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: wood (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 14 3/8 in x 11 1/2 in x 11 1/2 in; 36.5125 cm x 29.21 cm x 29.21 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall: 14 3/8 in x 11 3/8 in; 36.5125 cm x 28.8925 cm