A CALENDAR AND WIND-DIAL
are useful additions to some edifices. The Calendar indicates on special circles of a large dial—by means of three separate hands—the month of the year, the day of the month, and the day of the week. The peculiarity of this invention is that it needs no correction for the long and short months, nor even for the month of February, with its occasional 29 days; as by means of a wheel cut for the successive months in a period of four years, and which takes that time for a single revolution, the calendar is rendered a perpetual one. The mechanism which directs the pointers to the days of the week and of the month is discharged, by the clock, each night at 12 o'clock, when the levers shift the hands to their proper places on their several dials. On the first of the month all three hands on the dial are moved at the same instant.
The Wind-dial is lettered with the four cardinal points of the compass and the 12 intermediates. The hand which points on the dial is connected by rods and bevelled wheels with a vane at the top of the house, placed 20 feet above the roof in order to be affected, not by wind eddies, but by the true current of air. The connecting rods boxed in the wall are broken at every eight feet with universal joints, and hardened steel is used for all pivots and sockets. The dials are generally made of semi-transparent ground glass and are lit by gas after dark. In a set of Clock Calendars which I some time since provided for His Grace the Duke of Portland, the clock showed the time on four illuminated dials five feet nine inches in diameter, chiming quarters, hours, &c. (the well-known Cambridge chimes) on bells of 12 cwt., repeating the hour after the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd quarters. The two sides of an adjoining tower show a calendar similar to the one above mentioned, with the addition of an extra circle on the dial to mark the age of the moon and the equation of time, so that each dial has four circles, besides the circle of the moon, shifted simultaneously at 12 o'clock every night.
SUN-DIALS
(see illustration on following page) are chiefly used now to mark the solar meridian or noon. Those which indicate other hours have a gnomon with its edge parallel to the earth's axis and inclined to the horizon at the angle corresponding to the latitude of the place in which the dial is fixed.
CARILLON CHIMES.
These beautiful examples of al fresco music, which have been hitherto chiefly identified with Belgium, are now being produced in England with perhaps even more pleasing and satisfactory musical effect. Carillons attached to Church or Turret Clocks are being set up in various churches and mansions in different parts of the kingdom, and it is not improbable that the taste for such chimes may grow with the opportunity for hearing them. As in musical clocks, the works for time-keeping and those for chiming are entirely distinct, with the exception of the means by which the clock at certain fixed intervals lets off the
Sun-Dial.