In this episode, we delve into the fascinating history of the Shrine's Ray of Light. This feature was meticulously calculated so at 11am on November 11, a beam of sunlight would shine through a hole in the Shrine's roof and illuminate the word 'love' etched into the Stone of Remembrance. However, the introduction of daylight savings in 1971 threw a spanner in the works, causing the light to hit the stone an hour late.
Join us as we explore how Frank Johnston, a surveyor and RMIT lecturer, worked on a solution to this problem and has continued to keep the light shining 50 years on.
Transcript
LAURA THOMAS: Welcome to the Shrine Stories podcast, a series where we take you behind the scenes into the stories behind an object on our gallery floor. My name is Laura Thomas, and in this episode, we’re exploring the Ray of Light.
LAURA THOMAS: When the Shrine of Remembrance was designed, architects Hudson and Wardrop included a feature called ‘The Ray Of Light’. In simple terms, it is a hole in the Shrine’s roof that was meticulously calculated so that every year at 11am on November 11, a beam of sunlight would stream into the Sanctuary, and move across the Stone of Remembrance. It shone on the word ‘love’, in Greater Love Hath No Man, which is etched onto the stone.
LAURA THOMAS: It went off without a hitch and was a key feature in the Shrine of Remembrance. But then in 1971, daylight savings came along and threw a spanner in the works. Changing the clocks meant that the light hit the stone an hour later, at midday, rather than at 11am as originally intentioned.
LAURA THOMAS: For a few years, an artificial light was used. But the original surveyor of the Shrine, Frank Doolan, wasn’t happy with that solution. This is where today’s guest, another Frank, Frank Johnston, comes into the story. He is a surveyor, and at the time that this predicament came about, he was an RMIT surveying lecturer. Welcome Frank, and tell me about the first approach from the Shrine to help solve this problem…
FRANK JOHNSTON: Yes. Frank Doolan came up to RMIT, where I was a lecturer I think, 1974 or early in '75 he presented the problem, we could see straight away what the problem was, and so we started to think about solutions. He had told us that the one thing that had been tried was theatre spotlights, but they weren't sufficient to be able to throw a strong beam. Interestingly, in the 50 years since then, they have actually managed to use that type of light very effectively on the stone for visitors coming in every half hour through the day. Anyway, Frank suggested that maybe we could put a mirror outside on the wall of the Shrine, or near up at the very top where the roof starts. But he realised that that was going to be something that could be seen all the time, and would not be a very good idea. And we could see that that wasn't going to be work very well at all.
LAURA THOMAS: What kind of solutions were you considering?
FRANK JOHNSTON: Oh, well, obviously, the solution is to have a mirror that sends the beam of light that's needed down through the roof and then the outer ceiling and the inner ceiling into the main Shrine chamber down on the route that the beam at 11am as intended before daylight saving was taking, so that's what we had to achieve to get a beam to go, a sun beam to go down that line. So mirrors was the way to go. But instead of one mirror, we realised that if we had two mirrors, we could do it fairly straightforwardly. Now, in those days, we taught the students astronomy and spherical geometry. So I was used to dealing in those areas. So I was able to do the calculations that enabled us to achieve what we wanted. And we realised that as an ongoing thing, it would be great to have one mirror that was at an angle and the other mirror, which had to go right in the outer aperture of the holes, the two holes in the Shrine roof that enabled the beam to go into the main Shrine, onto the stone. We had to put a mirror in that aperture, outer aperture, and we had to do that every year because it wasn't going to stay there for the 12 months. So it had to be simple. That was the key to it, putting a horizontal mirror in there, which could be done quickly, and then make any adjustments that were necessary on a mirror that was on the upper walkway of the Shrine. Now we were lucky that the upper walkway is not open to the public, and it's got a parapet about four foot high that goes right around so that anything we, the little pillar we decided to put there was quite safe and hidden from view, and so that's what we started to work on.
LAURA THOMAS: So you've got a mirror up on the upper balcony that reflects...
FRANK JOHNSTON: On the walkway of the upper balcony, yes.
LAURA THOMAS: And that reflects a mirror there, bounces a light onto a mirror...
FRANK JOHNSTON: Onto a mirror in the outer aperture that we pop in there every year, and it's horizontal, and then the beam of light hits that mirror and then goes down at the correct time on the path that it was planned in when the Shrine was designed to go down.
LAURA THOMAS: Now, Frank, I liked that earlier you said 'the solution was simple', because for my very non mathematical mind, it sounds quite complex. How long did it take you to come up with this?
FRANK JOHNSTON: Oh, well, we worked on it for quite some time. Interestingly, the head of the Department of Surveying was Geoff Thompson, and Geoff Thompson and I had been through the course at Melbourne University surveying course together, so we'd known one another for 25 years before that. And so we worked on it, and we nutted it out fairly straightforwardly. You know, you do a couple of hours of calculations, but then you ponder, and you're thinking,you check it from different directions. No, we were happy that we had the thing nailed, but there was another problem too, was being able to check and set that mirror up at the angle that we wanted it. And that was something we had surveying equipment, special surveying equipment, attachments to a theodolite to be able to do. And so I devised the system of how to do that, and we've used that for the last nearly 50 years,
LAURA THOMAS: What's a theodolite?
FRANK JOHNSTON: Oh theodolite is the main instrument that a surveyor has used for measuring angles, for horizontal angles and vertical angles. They become incorporated with electronics, and you can have an electronic theodolite. As time goes by, more and more computing power so that, yes, the young surveyors go out there, and they can do an incredible amount of calculations on the job. But we didn't have that ability 50 years ago, but we got by. And the funny thing is that the theodolite that we use, which has this special attachment, the young surveyors who help us, they can't use that unless we very carefully instruct them on what to do.
LAURA THOMAS: How technology changes.
FRANK JOHNSTON: Oh, absolutely.
LAURA THOMAS: You touched on this very briefly, but having to come back every year to assess it. So tell me a little bit about that. You've been to many a Remembrance Day now.
FRANK JOHNSTON: Oh yes, I have. I've been to, we started in 1975 so next year, it'll be 50 years. So this will be the 50th time this year that we've been involved with setting it up so but I haven't been here every year, but nearly every year, as I don't suppose I've missed more than than three or four of those over those years.
LAURA THOMAS: And explain to me a little bit more what you're doing when you're coming back.
FRANK JOHNSTON: Well, when we come back, the pillar is about 25 centimetres in diameter, just a length of steel pipe that's about 1.2 meters high. And in the top of it, we've got a device arranged for the mirror to sit that covers, the mirrors, the diameter of the mirrors are just a little bit smaller than the diameter of the pipe, so it fits inside nicely, and we can tilt that mirror wherever we want because of the mechanism that we designed to go in there. We didn't do that the first year, we were experimenting. We just had little tripods with a little board on a like a camera tripod, where you can put the what you've got set there at any angle you want, for the direction you want. That's how we started. But then we realised, once we realised that it actually did work, perfectly satisfactory, we decided that we needed something permanent, so we designed this little pillar and put it there.
FRANK JOHNSTON: The pavement of the top walkway balcony is basalt blocks, probably about half a meter square, and they're set in bitumen. Now, the bitumen is a substance, which you know, when you're driving on roads in the summertime, the bitumen melts a little bit and it moves. Well up there on the upper balcony, the bitumen melts a little bit because the sun shines very strongly on it, and so these pavings move, and you can see that they're moving, because you can see the gaps are not even, originally they would have had perfectly even spaces between the paving stones. But no longer is that the case. So our pillar is sitting on these pavements, so we realised that we had to make sure that the mirror hadn't been moved so that it was outside the range, that it would send the sun along the line that it had to go. And so each year we come up and are involved with the mirror. Now we certainly haven't achieved sending the sun along that designed line every year because the clouds have been a big part in it, too. I'd say over the 50 years that we will have been coming this year, we've probably lost at least 10 or 12 due to cloudy weather. That's okay.
LAURA THOMAS: No amount of mirrors is going to help that one.
FRANK JOHNSTON: No, no amount of mirrors. In fact, for the last two years it's been cloudy on the day
LAURA THOMAS: Well, Frank, fingers crossed for the 90th
FRANK JOHNSTON: Absolutely. But we've always been there. We expect it to be clear. And of course, sometimes we're sitting there and it's cloudy, and then just a minute or two before it's time, there'll be a hole in the cloud. And of course, it can work the other way. It'll be sunny, and then just at the wrong moment, a cloud comes and blocks it out. But it's, so long as we've got about a five minute gap, the beam of light as the sun moves across the sky, it takes five, maybe six or seven minutes to move from one side of the stone to the other side of the stone, and so long as it comes out somewhere strongly during that six or seven minutes, then all right. We say, all right. We know that it's okay this year.
LAURA THOMAS: Take me back to the first year that you put this in place. Were there some nerves around?
FRANK JOHNSTON: Oh, of course, although, you know, we, it was all experimental. But the thing about it is that it happens for two or three days on either side, so that we had certainly been there a couple of days before, and we were fairly sure that we had it nailed for the first occasion in 1975 and yes, that was right, because there's got to be a bit of leeway in this, because every four years, an extra day goes into the year and the leap years, and so everything moves a little bit, so it's got to accommodate that. And it does. It's fine. It certainly, the spot of light on the stone will shift a little bit, but it'll still go through a part of the word 'love' as it goes right across the stone from the bottom right up to the top left corner.
LAURA THOMAS: Frank, where are you when 11 o'clock hits on Remembrance Day?
FRANK JOHNSTON: Well, we've always stayed between the outer aperture and the inner aperture. There's a big space which is behind the ceiling of the main chamber of the Shrine, because we're watching the sun beam as it moves down the wall towards this inner aperture. And just before 11 o'clock, the beam should hit that hole in the roof. If you're in the inner, if you're in the Shrine the standing near the Stone of Remembrance, you'll look up and you can see the hole there. Well, once the beam of light hits that hole, we know it's on the stone, and we record that time. We've been recording times for all of that 49 years.
LAURA THOMAS: Wow, and you can take a breath, a sigh of relief.
FRANK JOHNSTON: And we know, all right, we've achieved our purpose this year.
LAURA THOMAS: Now, Frank, you must be in a very unique position as having seen it probably more times than many others.
FRANK JOHNSTON: Oh, my word. Well, the interesting thing is that the only people who can see that is the official party, the Premier, the Governor and their wives and the Chairman of the Shrine Board committee, and that's about it. There's four soldiers stand there with their heads bowed, but they have their backs to it so they don't see it. Yeah, so, but I've seen it often. But interestingly, since daylight saving of course, the sun goes across the stone at 12 o'clock. We make sure that we take the mirror out soon after the ceremony is finished. At 12 o'clock, the sun does what it's designed to do, and the beam, it shines directly through the outer aperture, through the inner aperture, and onto the stone. And the public can therefore see how it was designed. And so that has become quite a feature, that people, people realise that they can see the thing actually taking place naturally. Yes, I've certainly done that on a number of occasions over the years.
LAURA THOMAS: Is there any Remembrance Day in particular that sticks out in your memory?
FRANK JOHNSTON: I can remember the people who've helped over the years, students, some students have had a real interest in that, and they've helped us for some years but then, of course, moved on in their lives and in their careers, I've been at it for 50 years and a couple of others in particular, David Silcock has been sort of taking over, but he's already been retired for seven or eight years. But nevertheless, if he's going to go as long as Frank Doolan and I, Frank Doolan, when he came to us, was 91. And I'm 91 now, so I'm putting the hard word on David. He's got a few years to go.
LAURA THOMAS: He can carry the torch for a while yet.
FRANK JOHNSTON: He will carry the torch.
LAURA THOMAS: How does it feel to have left such a strong legacy on the Shrine of Remembrance, especially as we're about to celebrate our 90th anniversary since the dedication.
FRANK JOHNSTON: Yes, it is something that's quite satisfying that, yeah, I feel a bit of a fraud sometimes with the publicity the newspapers and the TV stations, especially around the centenary of the end of the First World War in 2018 and so I did a couple of presentations at that time. It's been something I've been known for. My one claim to fame, shall we say?
LAURA THOMAS: I think it's a pretty big one to have to be able to manage to get the Ray of Light into the Sanctuary for 11 o'clock as it was originally intentioned. Thank you so much, Frank for your service to the Shrine and for chatting with us today. It's been absolutely fascinating.
FRANK JOHNSTON: Thanks, Laura
LAURA THOMAS: Thanks for listening to this episode of Shrine Stories. For more, make sure you subscribe to our channel wherever you listen.
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