Talk:Signalling mirror

Page Introduction

Why this page now? What about notability?

I've long had creating this page in mind - the corresponding page in the German Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenspiegel

has been in place for 20 years. I was spurred to create it because it was suggested to add this subject to the existing Heliograph article, which is already a well-developed article on the traditional tripod-mounted solar telegraph, and I noticed that "signal mirror" was redirected to the solar telegraph page when most people looking for "signal mirror" would be looking for information on these handheld distress devices.

Why this subject title?

I chose the singular form for the subject, since that is norm in other Wikipedia articles on mirrors.

I chose "signalling mirror" rather than "signal mirror" or "signaling mirror" or something longer, because we already had a longstanding, well-populated Wikimedia category called "signalling mirrors"(which provided several of the figures) , and since "daylight signalling mirror" is the term that has been used in the international treaty for Safety of Life At Sea (SOLAS) that requires to be carried in oceangoing lifeboats and liferafts worldwide since 1948, as well as in the applicable ISO specification, ISO 18813(2006).

I avoided "heliograph" because that is not a recognized term for these devices in the United States, whereas the term "signalling mirror" is recognized worldwide.  Also, that subject title is taken - since 2005 we have had Wikipedia article on the original heliographs - the tripod-mounted solar telegraphs popularized by the British inventor Sir Henry Mance in the 1870s, and used worldwide by militaries through WW2, and by surveyors into the 1980s. Macchess (talk) 05:27, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Potential Conflicts of Interest

For over 20 years, three of my hobbies have been heliotropes (the now-obsolete surveying instruments) heliographs (of the now-obsolete tripod-mounted sun-telegraph kind) and daylight signalling mirrors. I collect them, research them, lecture on them, construct them, train people how to use them, and have served as an unpaid consultant and tester for daylight signalling mirrors.

I have no financial interest in any of this - I'm just a hobbyist.

However, I did create some of the figures - in particular, I created the bar chart summarizing the 1944 USCG/RAF test data, and I used some photographs of mirrors in my collection when I thought I could do better than what I found in the WIkimedia collection: "Signalling Mirrors".

Thinking about it, I am the last standing organizer of the Boy Scout signalling mirror activity, "Operation On-Target", so I will go ahead and remove the two references to that activity from this article as my first edit as a potential conflict of interest.

Macchess (talk) 05:40, 20 April 2026 (UTC)