The Bureau Calls at the Solarium
Dr. Luna Solare receives visitors in a converted seawater pumping station above Camogli, on the Ligurian coast, in a building she calls the Solarium, and she receives them before four in the afternoon. The rule is not affectation. There is no artificial light in the east wing, and the demonstration she gives requires a shadow.
The Bureau’s correspondent arrived at half past ten on the fourth of February. The entrance hall carries thirty-one dials and not one of them is electric: a brass vertical decliner off a Genoese chapel, a silver pocket ring, and a plaster cast of one face of the Tower of the Winds, the octagonal Athenian building that was standing in the Roman Agora by about 50 BC with eight dials on its outside and a water clock within, for the nights. The door was opened by Renata Vassallo, who has been the workshop’s chief instrument-maker since it had no workshop, and who gives every visitor the same ninety-second demonstration in the hall before Solare is troubled at all. Solare, when she came down, walked past all thirty-one dials without comment and held out her wrist.
On it was the object. A 38-millimetre case in brushed titanium; a sapphire dial cut, not printed, with forty-eight hour-lines; a style of 4.1 millimetres canted at 44 degrees 21 minutes, which is the latitude of the room we were standing in. Sixty-one grams. It gave the correct time to the minute, and it gave it because the window behind her faced south-southeast and the morning was clear. Had either fact been otherwise it would have done nothing at all, and Solare would have regarded that as a property rather than a fault. One convention should be recorded here, since it accounts for most of the plates that follow. Press and catalogue units leave Camogli with a dummy hand fitted over the style and the dial lit from behind — a shadow does not photograph — and Vassallo signs off every one of them under protest.
In Her Own Words
What follows was recorded in the south room of the Solarium, chosen, she said, so that the recorder would also be running on daylight. She answered for fifty-one minutes and never once conceded the obvious objection. The Bureau has not tidied that away.
Dr. Luna Solare
Applied physicist · Founder, Solare Instruments · Camogli
Recorded at the Solarium on 4 February 2024. Two questions on battery life were declined on the grounds that the watch does not have one in the sense meant.
The Bureau
You spent twelve years making other people's devices better at collecting sunlight. Why stop?
Solare
Because we were all doing the same absurd thing. We harvested the sun to run a machine that then ignored the sun completely — a sealed box being told the hour by a radio mast in Frankfurt. The 4.1-millimetre style is the shortest route I could find between the energy and the answer. Light arrives, the shadow falls, you read it. Nothing in between is negotiable, and nothing in between can be sold to you twice.
The Bureau
Take us through what the watch actually does.
Solare
A titanium style, canted to the wearer's latitude — the case knows where it is, so the style adjusts. Forty-eight lines cut into the sapphire. The shadow crosses them; that is the reading. The cell beneath the dial runs the compass, the inclinometer and the correction table, and the table is the only genuinely clever part, because apparent solar time is not clock time. The difference runs to sixteen and a half minutes in early November. We subtract it for you. A stone dial in a churchyard cannot.
The Bureau
And after sunset?
Solare
The dial goes quiet. People put that to me as though it were a scandal. Nobody has ever complained that a barometer is useless in a submarine. Between April and September on this coast you are given fourteen usable hours a day; the movement holds its last reading and keeps its own count for a hundred and forty days in the dark. What it will not do is guess. Every other watch on your wrist is guessing — it is simply guessing from a very good memory.
The Bureau
Critics call it a nostalgia object.
Solare
It is the exact opposite. Nostalgia is a quartz movement with a photograph of a sundial on the screen, and it costs whatever the screen costs. We ship the instrument. The hour-lines are cut. If every line of our software rots in twenty years the shadow still falls where the shadow falls, and I know of no other company in this trade willing to write that down.
The Bureau
The 2.5 shipped last spring. What changed?
Solare
The style sets itself now, through thirty-two degrees of travel, which is Crete to Iceland and covers everyone who has ever bought one. And it retracts, because the first series went through nine hundred and forty shirt cuffs in its opening month. We also took the correction table off the network. Owners in Reykjavik had been handed a dial that is unusable for six weeks of the year without anyone telling them; the watch now tells them so, in writing, on the morning it becomes true. Every decent instrument in my hall has its own error engraved on the back by the man who made it. We had shipped four years of watches with nothing on the back at all.
The Bureau
What is next?
Solare
A tide gauge for the wrist that reads the moon rather than a printed table, and a hygrometer that does not lie in a coat pocket. The principle does not change: put the instrument in contact with the thing it measures. I am told this is romantic. It is simply cheaper, and it lasts longer.
She then took from a drawer a nocturnal — the sighting disc that let sailors read the hour off the Guards of the Little Dipper through a hole aimed at Polaris, popularised for navigators by Martín Cortés de Albacar in 1551 — and said she had considered building one into the case and had decided against it. Asked why, she said that a watch which works at every hour teaches its owner nothing about any of them.
Plates: the instrument
The Life of Dr. Luna Solare
Solare is fifty-two. She has published eleven papers, holds four patents, and none of the four covers the thing she is known for. What follows is assembled from the Institute’s own records, from the Genoa commercial register, and from two afternoons of her discussing herself with visible reluctance.
Early Life and Education
Born in Camogli in January 1972, the second daughter of a harbour pilot, she has said she could read the weather off the bay some years before she could read a clock face. She took her degree in physics at the University of Genoa in 1994 and a doctorate in applied physics at the Politecnico di Milano in 2001. The thesis was called Angular Losses in Amorphous Silicon Cells Below Twenty Degrees of Incidence, it runs to 214 pages, and it mentions timekeeping exactly once, in a footnote about the difficulty of scheduling rooftop measurements in January.
Career and Inventions
From 2001 to 2013 she was at the Ligurian Institute for Applied Heliotechnics at Sestri Levante, improving the low-angle behaviour of thin-film cells for other companies’ products, and by her own account growing steadily less interested in the products. She founded Solare Instruments in a rented net loft in 2015 with two employees and a secondhand five-axis mill. One of the two was Renata Vassallo, a scale-maker’s daughter who had spent nineteen years cutting chapter rings for a Genoese restorer, and who cut every dial the company sold until 2021. The first Sun Dial Smartwatch shipped on 21 June 2019 — the solstice, which she maintains was a coincidence of the delivery schedule — in an edition of four hundred. The 2.5 followed in April 2023. Between them the two series have sold 61,000 units, a rounding error beside the wristwatch trade, which itself only stopped treating the wristwatch as ladies’ jewellery when the British War Department began issuing them to combatants in 1917.
Philosophy and Impact
Her position, restated at every opportunity and usually unprompted, is that an instrument ought to be in contact with the thing it measures, and that a display which cannot fail is a display that cannot be trusted. She is fond of noting that the Vrihat Samrat Yantra at Jaipur, a masonry gnomon 27 metres tall finished in the 1730s and inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2010, is reckoned to hold the hour to about two seconds and has never once required a firmware update. The comparison is not entirely fair to the wristwatch, and she knows it, and she makes it anyway.
The Bureau put to her the case of Anneke Duiker, an owner in Utrecht, who missed the 08:41 to Arnhem on a wet Tuesday last November because her watch had declined, correctly, to tell her anything at all. Solare heard the account out, agreed that the instrument had performed exactly as designed, and did not appear to feel that the two statements were in any tension.
Future Endeavours
Four instruments are on the bench at Camogli and none has a shipping date. A wrist tide gauge that takes the moon directly instead of a printed table. A hygrometer with an exposed element, which will therefore be ruined by a coat pocket, a consequence she describes as instructive. A pocket almanac whose entire display is the figure-of-eight analemma — the loop the sun traces if photographed from one spot at one clock time across a year — with the present day marked on it, and nothing else whatsoever. And, at the far end under a dust sheet, a calculating machine driven by its own vane, which will not turn over a single figure below Beaufort twelve. Camogli has recorded Beaufort twelve twice since 1951. Asked what the machine was for, she said arithmetic.
Recognition
The Andronicus Medal of the Société Gnomonique de Genève came in 2022, named for the builder of the Athenian tower whose cast hangs in her hall. Two design prizes followed and were accepted by post. She has declined eleven speaking invitations in eighteen months, on the stated grounds that conference halls have no windows, and she accepted the twelfth only after the organisers agreed to move her session to a terrace at eleven in the morning. Ninety-four people attended. It rained.
Plates: from the company album
Later Dispatches: The Counterfeit Affair
Nothing in the interview above survived contact with the following spring. Within fifteen weeks of the Bureau going to press the Sun Dial Smartwatch had been cloned, mis-sold, defended, litigated and finally hung on a wall in Venice, and the wire copy is reproduced here in the order it arrived.
The Counterfeit Affair on the Wire
Filed to the Bureau's Genoa desk, February to May 2024.
A Shenzhen wholesaler lists Sun Dial Smart Watch 2.5 at 19.40 euro in lots of two hundred. The listing photograph is the company's own.
Rotterdam detains 4,200 units in one container, declared at the port as solar garden ornaments.
Solare Instruments files in Genoa and in Shenzhen on the same morning, and discovers what every dial-maker since Anaximander already knew: the geometry is not anyone's property.
An account with 3.1 million followers posts a nine-second unboxing — the one clip in the whole affair that nobody paid for. The dial reads a quarter past four in a room with the curtains drawn.
The Shenzhen listing begins shipping a correction table with every lot. It is Solare Instruments' own file, PDF metadata and all, down to the stray comma in the November column.
A dial eighteen times full size opens in a side hall of the Arsenale. The wall label credits the counterfeiters by name.
The Clones
Shenzhen, 14 March. — Nine workshops, none of which appears to have met any of the others, are producing an object called the Sun Dial Smart Watch 2.5. It weighs 84 grams where the original weighs sixty-one; the case is zinc alloy under a titanium-coloured lacquer, and zinc is half again as dense as titanium, so the one test that requires no instrument at all is to pick the thing up. The hour-lines are silkscreened onto the underside of a mineral crystal, which means they are printed on the wrong side of the glass and shift with the viewing angle by up to eleven minutes. The style is moulded, fixed, and set to a latitude nobody in Europe asked for: 30 degrees, correct in Cairo and wrong by fourteen in Genoa. The clone works after dark. It carries a quartz movement behind the dial and simply draws the shadow, so the shadow keeps moving all night, at a stately and entirely fictitious pace, in a sealed drawer.
The Endorsements
Los Angeles, 2 April. — The six sponsored clips are indistinguishable from one another. Every one was recorded between eleven and one, outdoors, with the wearer’s arm raised toward the light — the exact conditions under which the genuine article and the fake are impossible to tell apart. “It just knows,” says one of them, turning the wrist slowly for the camera. “You don’t set it, you don’t charge it, you don’t do anything. It just knows where the sun is.” The sun is visible in the top left of the frame. Four of the six carried no disclosure whatsoever. The seventh clip is the nine-second unboxing filmed indoors with the curtains drawn, and it is the only one in the affair nobody was paid for: that creator told the Bureau she had not been sent a watch by anybody and had bought it herself, which is true, and which is precisely why the parcel arrived from Guangdong. The comment sections have since split into two camps of roughly equal conviction, one holding that the watch is a fraud because it stops at sunset, the other that it is a fraud because it does not.
The Artists
Venice, 19 May. — What began as a commercial dispute has ended, as these things do, in a side hall of the Arsenale. Eleven works, four of them acquired before the opening. Ruth Kastner’s wearable case crosses the floor on the hour, worn by somebody else; Kastner has not been to Venice. The Ferrante brothers have hung a dial the size of a millwheel that is lit only by whatever comes through the clerestory, and which is therefore blank for the last ninety minutes of every visiting day, at which point the guards begin, audibly, to explain. Solare attended, said nothing for an hour, and afterwards told this correspondent that the exhibition had understood the object better than her own marketing department ever had, and that she intended to say so to the marketing department.
Plates: the affair
