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Did You Know?

Switzerland Built a Clock That Is Deliberately Wrong for 58.5 Seconds Out of Every 60

Switzerland has a nuclear shelter space for almost every person in the country.

There are over 370,000 shelters in the country — roughly 360,000 private and 9,000 to 10,000 public — providing space for about nine million people in a country of about 9.1 million — roughly one place for every resident.

This is not a legacy of the Cold War that nobody got round to demolishing. It is the current law. Article 46 of the Federal Law on Civil Protection requires anyone building a residential building to construct and equip a shelter in it, and requires municipalities to provide public shelters where private provision falls short. New residents pay a one-off fee — currently proposed at CHF 800 to 1,400 per home — toward construction and maintenance.

Switzerland is still spending on them. Around CHF 220 million is earmarked over fifteen years, with annual maintenance spending rising from CHF 9 million to CHF 15 million from 2027. Two hundred larger bunkers are being modernised.

The distribution is uneven — Geneva sits at only 75% coverage — and about 100,000 of the smallest private shelters, built for seven people or fewer, are being retired.

And in the meantime, they are wine cellars. And saunas. And storage rooms. The University of Bern keeps things in one. The Sonnenberg shelter in Lucerne has its entrance in the middle of a children's playground.

The clock: which makes Zurich's most famous export make a certain kind of sense.

A country of about 9.1 million people has built and maintained some nine million shelter places for an event that has not happened, and put wine in them while it waits. The clock does the same thing every sixty seconds.

In 2012 Apple shipped iOS 6 with a clock app whose face was a black-and-white dial with no numbers and a red second hand ending in a small disc. Swiss Federal Railways noticed. The design is legally protected. Apple had not asked.

The settlement was undisclosed, but has been widely reported at somewhere around €16 million — for a clock face designed for train platforms by a railway engineer in the 1940s.

The engineer was Hans Hilfiker (1901–1993), and the reason his clock is famous is not the design. It is the second hand, which is wrong on purpose.

Swiss railway timetables contain no seconds. Trains leave on the whole minute, always. So every station clock in the country is driven by an electrical impulse sent down the telephone network from one master clock, once a minute, which advances the minute hand.

The second hand, though, runs on its own motor — and Hilfiker deliberately set it to run fast. It completes its circle of the dial in 58.5 seconds. Then it stops at twelve and waits for about a second and a half until the master impulse arrives, the minute hand jumps, and the trains are released.

Hilfiker's stated reason for the pause: to "bring calm in the last moment and ease punctual train departure."

So for 58.5 seconds out of every 60, the most famous punctuality symbol in the world is showing you the wrong time. It arrives early and waits. It is only exactly right at the single instant that actually matters — and it is right at that instant in every station in Switzerland simultaneously.

Modern electronics made the pause unnecessary decades ago. The Swiss kept it anyway.

Almost: there was a brief scandal. Around 2014, to save money, the railways began quietly removing second hands when their separate motors wore out. Commuters were upset. Designers accused the railway of vandalism. A Zurich newspaper complained, reasonably, that without the red hand you cannot tell five seconds past the minute from fifty-five.

The clock stayed. It is a registered trademark, licensed to a watchmaker since 1986, and it still hangs in thousands of Swiss stations doing the same thing it has done since 1955: racing round the dial, arriving early, and standing perfectly still for a second and a half while an entire country's railway network agrees on what minute it is.