Mondaine stop2go wall clock

What is it?

It is the Swiss railway clock at home size. The face is the one Hans Hilfiker, an SBB engineer, drew in 1944: no numerals, black bars, and a red seconds hand shaped like the disc a dispatcher raises to send a train off.

Mondaine has made it under licence from SBB since 1986. This one is its wall clock, 25 cm across, set up once over Wi-Fi.

Why does the red hand stop at twelve?

Because the station clocks were never meant to keep their own time.

A master clock sent one electrical impulse a minute, at zero seconds. The seconds hand finished its turn a little early and waited at twelve for that signal, so every clock on the network moved to the next minute together.

SBB’s own design system puts one turn at about 58.5 seconds. The stop2go copies the habit at home: 58 seconds round and a 2 second stop, then the minute hand jumps.

How did a railway fitting become a design object?

By staying where it was. Almost 5,000 of the clocks still hang in Swiss stations, run by about 760 master clocks.

The face has had its own room at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich. In 2012 SBB licensed it to Apple after it appeared on the iPad, and the fee was kept confidential.

Where does the big one stand?

In the main hall of Zurich Hauptbahnhof, over the meeting point. Mondaine’s history describes a clock four metres high there, in a hall about 300,000 people cross each day.

It is the clock in the photograph at the top of this page. The one for a wall at home has the same face and the same stop.