This folding compass and dial was made in the late seventeenth century, probably in Dieppe. This compass is made in ivory with silver fittings. The exterior of this compass is engraved with a dial. The inner face is fitted with a compass, and a table of latitudes on coloured paper.
These sundials were portable and essential for accurate time-keeping, and would have beed used by merchants, sea captains, travellers, and indeed anyone who wished to know the time, in the days before accurate pocket watches or of course wrist watches. They relied on measuring the sun’s changing direction in the sky, indicating the hour of the day through the angle of the shadow cast by the gnomon, which was the string in the hinged portable sundials. In order to work correctly the direction dials das to be properly aligned, and for this reason such portaqble sundials needed to incorporate magnetic compasses.
Ivory was a suitable material for a number of reasons: it was not heavy, did not warp as easily as wood, and its light colour and realtive softness meant that it was easy to inscribe. Such objects were produced from the fifteenth century up to the early twentieth.