When I was a boy of about 7 or 8, it was common for the kids from my small village in the Azores-Portugal, to play a game where we tried to guess the time of day by the shade of a stick stuck in the ground or by the direction of our own shadow. Our village was quite poor, and in the 1940's there were not a lot of timepieces available.

So we would play this guessing game using the angle of the shadows as our clue and call out if we believed the time was nine, ten, or twelve, and so on.

I also had wondered over the years why timepieces did not use the large hand to mark the hours. If the hour is more important, why not use the big hand to indicate it? It makes more sense, and it's easier to learn and to read.

I even went as far as to think that one day I would have a watch made just for me in this way. But as the years went by, I gradually moved these notions to the back of my mind. Then in 1991, when I sold my business and began to look for something else to pursue, I realized that the time had come at last to make that long-held dream of mine a reality.

And so I did it. In the USA., I created a graphic design of my idea, brought it to a lawyer and he copyrighted and patented it. Many times after making that decision, I feared it was probably a big mistake and might never be accepted. But I also felt a strong conviction that I had to persist, if only for just this reason: if timepieces originally had been designed using the big hand to mark the hours, as inspired by the sundial, and defined by this new concept, the watches we have today would have seemed completely illogical and counterintuitive if introduced afterwards.

It was this belief that kept me going, that sooner or later The Sundial Watch would succeed in bringing its simultaneously traditional and revolutionary logic to every wrist bold enough to try it.

Eduardo Resende