Do you know why the Swiss station clock takes a break every minute? And that Apple had to pay a copyright infringement fine for including the watch design in its operating system?

15 comments

  1. The CFF/SBB wristwatch got a huge backlash when it didn’t stop every minute. It felt like something was off with the watch.

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    (To be fair to watchmakers, it added complexity to the watch and they don’t really make watches give time worse in general. The new version of the watch stops 🙂 )

  2. It does that for (old) technical reasons. The clocks are synchronized once a minute, instead of every second.

    The seconds arm is basically not part of the time system. It’s just a thing that rotates **roughly** once a minute, and resets everytime a new minute starts.

  3. TLDR part:

    > The reason for this odd second stop is in the technology. In 1947, when Hilfiker’s new clock was introduced, synchronisation to the second wasn’t yet possible. The master clocks responsible for controlling the timekeeping delivered an electrical impulse only once a minute, at precisely zero seconds, which ensured all the clocks connected to that circuit were accurate. However, because the SBB clock was still supposed to indicate the seconds, Hilfiker reached into his bag of tricks and had the red pointer driven by an ordinary electric motor. The motor wasn’t very precise and so it had to be set to run a little fast, so that the second hand always reached the twelve one or two seconds too early and then waited for the minute signal.

  4. Almost ten years ago, one evening I built a free watch app without monetization that did it exactly right. Clearly stated that it wasn’t my design, summarized its history in the app and even linked the SBB store. Got a couple hundred downloads.

    Within a week I received a written request from SBB lawyers to take it down or face legal repercussions.

    $edit: This is an anecdote from a long time ago. I thought it was an interesting story relevant to this topic. I don’t need a bunch of hateful DMs from smart asses who NOW think I still don’t know how these legal things work. I was basically a kid back then.

  5. Why are the Mondaine ones so expensive? They’re not of particularly high quality. Anyone know a good alternative?

  11. > Investigations by the Swiss media revealed that it was likely to have been around 20 million francs.

    Did the Swiss media investigation extend to what the SBB actually did with the CHF 20million they squeezed out of Apple? Was it used for infrastructure investment? Or go on executive bonuses?

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