Dear Friends, This is an update on the "Help with Unusual Sundial" message I sent on Jan 16th.
The best news so far is that another broken piece of the dial has come to light. My correspondent at Randolph Air Force Base has promised to sent me a photograph. In the meantime it appears that Randolph Air Force Base itself is going to be "outsourced", or shut down, and he is busy looking for a job. Fred Sawyer's list of patent registrations indicates that the maker, donor, and patent applicant - Fred G. Hagner - lived in San Antonio where Randolph Air Force Base is located. Since the dial was erected in 1959, I was hoping a relative might still be living nearby who could provide more information, but this is not the case. Fer deVries' suggestion that there must have been a horizontal ring is a good one, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence for a place where it was attached. Art Carlson's suggestion that the existing equatorial ring should be aligned with the local longitude up also makes sense. This would put the text "International Date Line" in the right place. This would also make the dial capable of relating longitude and time as suggested by Fer. The hours shown on the existing equatorial ring are much too crude to have been the actual readout for solar time, so the readout must have been done somewhere else - on one of the missing parts. Although I have not yet made changes to the conjectural reconstruction on the web pages, I now suspect 1) that "The Pointer" did not link the two existing pieces as I have shown it, and 2) the hours may not have been on the globe. Tom McHugh made the comment that "Things just don't happen at government installations without documentation.". He further suggested that some basic research might bring results. I had already brought this up with my correspondent at RAFB, but he has not been very responsive - and he is also job hunting. In addition to documentation there must have been some photographs taken in in front of "The Taj" during the late 50's or early 60's that included the dial. At this point the most helpful addition to this quest would be a knowledgeable dialist who is willing to visit RAFB and do some research. For those who are picking up this thread at this point, the original web pages can still be seen at: http://www.shadow.net/~bobt/rafb I will post another message when I have the photograph of the newly-found part. Best regards, Bob Terwilliger
