Horloges solaire - étain

UNIVERSAL SOLAR CLOCK

In the evolution of mankind there are few things which belong so strongly to the past as the solar clock.

Its history goes back to far centuries. It certainly begins with the immediate experience of night and day alternation and change in the length and direction of shadows. It is easy to suppose that the first instrument for measuring time has been a stick or a post rammend in the ground. The solar clock had a wide diffusion among travellers and merchants in the second half of the 17th century but at the end of the 20th century it lost its importance in regulating social life as a consequence of the hight tecnological level achieved by mechanical clocks.

After almost a century of dark and silence, a surprisingly lively interest in solar clock is now arising. The new attention for these forgotten instruments represeents the instinctive nostalgia for an age in which days were counted in quarters of hour, work was carried out from sunrise to sunset, the passing of time was measured by the slow lenghtening of shadows and in which people arranged appointments "when your shadow will be ten times your foot" (Aristophanes).

The person who fells too compressed by today's culture of time frenzy will find in the object we are proposing a moment of relax while observing the passing of time, in the displacing of shadows, in a dimension again human and acceptable.