Time to Shine

– Cat Phan: Hey, Kacie.

– Kacie Lucchini Butcher: Hey, Cat.

– Whatcha doing?

– Well, my watch battery died, and I read somewhere online that you can use the Sun to tell time.

– Oh, hey, yeah, I’ve read about that too.

Does it work?

What time is it right now?

– Well, if you take into account the Sun and the horizon line and daylight savings time and the vernal equinox, I think it’s midnight?

– I’m not so sure about that.

– Wait, I forgot the autumnal equinox.

– Actually, what if we go see a different tool that people used to use to tell time before they wore watches?

– Well, this isn’t really working, so we might as well.

– Let’s do it.

– Let’s go.

[upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] [television static] – Hi.

– Beth Kowalski: Hello, welcome to the Neville Public Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

We’re so happy to have you here today.

– Thanks for having us.

So we did come with a specific question for you.

My watch battery died today, and I’ve been late to all my meetings, I can’t get anywhere on time, and we thought we would look to the past for an answer.

We heard you might have something historic that could help me tell the time.

– Love that you wanna look to the past for the present.

So yes, we absolutely do have some things, specifically, a artifact that we can take a look at and learn about its story.

So come on, let’s take a look.

This is a Le Maire sundial.

It’s a combination of both compass and sundial, and it was meant to be that size, so it was definitely meant for travel and for your pocket.

– Are you wondering what the heck is a sundial?

We’ve got you covered.

A sundial is a device that tells you the time of day when the sunlight is shining on it.

It’s made of a flat plate or a base and a gnomon, which is a part that casts a shadow.

As the Sun moves, the shadow cast by the gnomon also moves, and that lets you figure out the time.

– Well, there’s so many small details on there.

Well, good thing we brought these.

– Oh, yeah, I brought mine.

– Same.

Ooh, look at the north, south, east, west on the top there.

It’s so cool.

– Kacie: Oh, yeah, that’s a part of the compass.

And then all these numbers around the edge, got all these Roman numerals.

I wonder if people must have just known how to read Roman numerals back then.

– Yeah, there’re Roman numerals and there’re also Arabic numerals.

– Oh, do you see this bird on the side?

– Where?

– Kacie: On the sundial part that pops out, there’s a bird.

I mean, I like the artful kind of designs.

It seems like obviously it was an object that was useful, but it also seems like it was beautiful.

So it looks like it says Le Maire Paris, so Paris, it must’ve been made in Paris.

– Instruments like the Le Maire sundial were made by special craftsmen; in this case, by a Frenchman named Pierre Le Maire.

How do we know his name?

Well, he put it right on the sundial, along with the city where he worked, Paris.

It’s like old school branding.

This sundial is made of brass, which is an alloy or mixture of the metals copper and zinc.

That’s already pretty fancy, but we have some sundials that are even more luxurious, made of materials like silver.

No matter what they were made of, sundials like this one were of high value, and not something most people had laying around.

So what can you tell us about the sundial?

– So the interesting part about the sundial, it’s how we kind of came to be here at the Neville Public Museum.

A gentleman named Frank Duchateau, who was an early local historian, early amateur archaeologist, after rainstorms, he would actually walk fields and look for things that were left behind by people.

And on one of his explorations, he came across this sundial.

It’s not perfectly intact, but it dates back, way back to the origins of the Green Bay area, when the influence of the French and the fur traders were in this area.

– We think this sundial is probably from around the 1750s.

So what’s happening in Wisconsin?

Well, this is around a century before Wisconsin became a state.

Native peoples had been living in this area for thousands of years.

The first Europeans to arrive were French explorers and fur traders who started coming in the 1600s.

Native nations allowed the French and other Europeans to establish trading posts on their lands.

Native peoples would hunt and trap fur-bearing animals like beavers.

They then traded these with Europeans for items like metal cookware, muskets, tools, clothes, and other goods.

Throughout the 1600s and 1700s, the French were very active in the fur trade in Wisconsin.

Lots of early maps of the area are even in French!

– So we’re noticing some writing on the back.

What can you tell us about what’s on here?

– So one of the most fascinating things, to me at least, there’s coordinates, it’s longitude and latitude, so very much how we teach kiddos how to recognize that on a map today.

But one of the specific coordinates that is on there is La baye, and that means La baye, Wisconsin or Green Bay, Wisconsin.

– Sure, oh, yeah, you can read some of the names back here, like… Oh, I see the Quebec on there.

– Beth: Quebec?

– Cat: Yeah, Quebec, very cool.

And I like looking at the com– or the top part where there’s some, maybe a fleur-de-lis on the N on there.

Shows the Frenchness.

[television static] [bright music] – Sundials are important for telling time, but that’s probably not the most important way this sundial was used.

This sundial also had a magnetic compass, so you could use it to help you find your way around.

This was probably the most important use for this sundial, helping its French owner navigate or find his way around back when the area was much more covered in forests and plains.

In Paris, where this was made, navigating with a compass wasn’t all that important.

It was a city!

But across the Atlantic in North America, this was really important.

This sundial even has a list of names and the latitudes for places in North America, including trading posts, French forts, and Native settlements.

One of them says La baye 44.15, and that’s present-day Green Bay.

So I mean, it looks really nice.

Like, this seems like a nice tool.

Do you know who might’ve owned something like this?

– That’s kind of the mystery behind it because you have to imagine, this was a crossroads here in northeastern Wisconsin of different people and different cultures meeting.

– The 1750s is also when France and Great Britain fought the French and Indian War, which lasted from 1754 to 1763.

This was a war between France and Britain, although both sides also had Native allies.

Sundials like this one were given to French army officers, so there’s a good chance that’s who owned this one.

So Kacie, what’d you think of that sundial?

– I thought it was so cool.

I mean, first of all, I don’t know if I’ve ever touched anything that old, but then all the details and thinking about how people used to find their way around without cell phones?

– I know.

– What a wild experience.

– Yeah, and what I thought was also really cool is just the La baye 44.15 written on there.

It just really brings history to Wisconsin, which I thought was so cool.

– Definitely.

The Le Maire sundial is a reminder that people have been using different tools to tell time for hundreds, even thousands of years, but it’s also an example of how technologies can have different uses in different places.

In Europe, a sundial like this was really important for telling time, but in North America, the sundial’s compass was probably its most important feature.

Have you ever used the Sun to tell time?

Try it out.

This can be as simple as placing a stick in the ground and marking the different shadow positions at different times of day, no batteries required.

A flat plate or base, and a what?

[participants laughing] Can’t hear it.

[laughs] Bing, bing, blah, hello?

Bing, bing, bing, bing.

Bing, bing, bing [laughs] [bright music]