TIMELESS DESIGN

TIMEPIECE OF THE CENTURIES

WHEN THE ELECTRICITY went out and all the clocks in his house were wrong, John Carmichael had a ready solution. When the electricity came back on, he says, "I went around and set the clocks using the sundial. It was the only thing that was working."

Standing in his sunny studio in the foothills of Tucson's Santa Catalina Mountains, where he crafts works of art that tell time, Carmichael enthusiastically recounts the reasons sundials are perfect for Arizona: "One, we're the astronomy capital of the world. Two, we don't have daylight-saving time, so the sundial is always right. Three, we have more hours of sunshine than any other state."

The ticking of unwinding springs lured people away from light-and-shadow timetelling during the 19th century. Machineage clocks and standardized time demoted the sundial from essential timepiece to mere ornament, and ornaments do not have to keep accurate time.

The most accurate sundials earn the confidence-inspiring name "heliochronometers." True, shadows on stone cannot compete with sophisticated atomic clocks for second-splitting accuracy, but a sundial properly manufactured and installed gets you to the church on time. And it never needs winding.

"How many times do you have to reset your clock or watch?" Carmichael asks. Carmichael spends as much energy explaining sundials as he does creating them. He scowls at foundries that mass-produce brass sundials.

"They get ahold of a nice antique sundial from London," he says, "and then they make a mold and start stamping them out and selling them all over the United States."

Carmichael designs his hand-carved sundials for the specific latitude where they stand, and says, "A sundial will work within roughly a 50-mile radius. One made for Tucson will be eight minutes off if moved to Phoenix."

According to the president of the North American Sundial Association, fewer than a dozen people in the United States make accurate timekeepers like Carmichael's.

John Carmichael grew up in a family of artists and always loved the outdoors and creating things with his hands. After earning a degree in horticulture from the University of Arizona in Tucson, Carmichaelmoved to Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, where he owned a plant nursery. When he sold the nursery and returned to Tucson, time weighed heavy, until he read a book that changed his life.

An artist friend gave Carmichael a copy of Sundials: Their Construction and Use, which compiles 15thand 16th-century information in easy-to-understand language.

"My friend knew that I love nature, astronomy and working with my hands. When I got to the very end of the book with the tangents and cotangents and cosigns and all that stuff, I thought, 'Wow, if I can learn to work these formulas, I can make all these wonderful sundials they talk about in here.'"

He taught himself trigonometry and started working in wood, but soon switched to more durable stone. He learned which stone would polish well and resist cracking, how to carve with an electric bur, how to cut and inlay brass. He also mastered a computer program that helps design the timepiece.

Wheels of Coconino flagstone, 2 inches thick and 2 to 3 feet in diameter, sit on tables in his studio. Some of the pink and beige rocks have preliminary fine lines carved; some have brass inlays. A finished dial, polished to a marblelike sheen, tells time with a cable stretching diagonally from a center post to a bracket on the edge of the sundial. To hold the cable taut, Carmichael used various counterweights, such as brass and highly polished stones.

The cable sets these creations apart. Traditionally, a solid triangular shape called a gnomon casts a broad shadow. Carmichael's copyrighted cable gnomon, made of flexible brassstranded cable manufactured for grandfather clocks, casts a thin, precise shadow on the stone.

Carmichael points to a reproduction of a Spanish pocket sundial sitting on a table. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson carried such pocket dials. He flips open the small box to reveal the little compass that aligns the sundial with north. A string extends from the open lid to the base, casting a shadow on hour markers. The structure resembles Carmichael's cable gnomens.

People are delighted to discover that their sundials also are moondials.

"There is a conversion chart with the sundial. If you know the phase of the moon, you add or subtract minutes. It moves through the sky two minutes an hour," Carmichael says. Sundials can tell more than time. The Renaissance dial faces were packed with information.

"Once Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton discovered how the planets moved, in the 16th century, that was immediately incorporated into the designs," Carmichael says. His pieces tell the dates of the solstices, equinoxes and times of sunrises and sunsets.

Carmichael builds about 15 backyard sundials a year, but dreams of building something bigger than his biggest, a grand pianosize slab. Someday he would like to build a monumental sundial in a public place, like the 10-story-tall sundial at an astronomical center in Jaipur, India.

"The larger a sundial, the more accurate. The bigger it is, the more minutes you can engrave." Carmichael often uses the word "accurate." After all, his heliochronometer is more than a pretty face it tells time.

Author's Note: Visitors to Tohono Chul Park in Tucson can see one of John Carmichael's largest heliochronometers.

For more information, contact John Carmichael at Precision Sundial Sculptures, (520) 696-1709.

Tucson-based Vera Marie Badertscher is glad to find a new use for Arizona sunshine. She also wrote the following story about goat trekking.

Since Phoenix-based photographer Jill Reger shot this story, she has thrown away all her clocks and watches, and now keeps track of time only with a sundial. She still manages to make it to all of her appointments on time.