Showing People a Good Time for Hundreds of Years

Medieval witchcraft?

I’d been wandering the quiet early Sunday morning streets of Zurich Switzerland on my own for several hours as a general sense of unease slowly grew. I was a stranger in a new place and something was wrong. A whisper in my head warned something was not right.

The streets were too clean? The water in the city canals and lake was too clear? Too many flowers? Where were the police? Seriously, I had not seen any.

I glanced at one of the many public clocks impossible to miss in this city and checked the time; still too early for lunch but I was hungry and getting tired. Maybe I should start finding my way back to the hotel.

Could I find my way back?

I double checked the public clock time against the time on my wrist: they were the same.

Let me tell you something about the watch on my wrist: It was a gift from my lovely wife five years ago, a large faced smart Garmin Fenix 3hr with built-in GPS that automatically keeps its time synchronized with satellite precision. The time it shows is perfect.

I swiveled my head toward the largest public clock face in Europe; the enormous black dial on the tower of Saint Peter’s church which was built about four hundred years ago, and compared its time to my perfect GPS time. The time was the same.

How odd.

Not even off by a minute.

In my experience back home in the USA, and most places around the world, public clocks are outright broken or will at best, give you a flavor of what time it might currently be. Use them at your own risk.

I wondered, is it a fluke that I’ve stumbled onto a few carefully tuned public clocks? Here is what I discovered over the next few days: This was not a fluke.

What’s with these Zurich people?

These people in Zurich really care about keeping their clocks honest. Look at the picture below and you will find three large public clocks in the picture all showing the same time as my wristwatch.

Over the next two days that we spent in Zurich I made a point to note any and all public clocks that I walked by, and in some cases I took a picture holding my watch up in the same frame. What I found is this:

All the medieval clockworks are keeping perfect time to the minute. Amazing.

Modern electric clocks showing public time to sidewalk strollers, with only one or two exceptions, also always had the correct time.

Ironically, inside clock and watch store windows: the displayed time sucked. The salespeople clearly don’t make much of an effort to keep their wares showing the right time.

The public works people in Zurich however, they are serious about showing you good time.

All of Switzerland?

No. Zurich public-facing timekeeping is very good, and as you work your way toward the city of Geneva it degrades. I even found a fake clock face on a train platform near Geneva: looked just like a clock dial but would never move. Why train station people, why? How many people have glanced at that fake clock and thought “good I did not miss my train”, but they did.

How Zurich does it

The modern electric clocks have modern mechanisms so no real mystery on how they would have the right time. The impressive feat is how Zurich has managed to keep their ironworks medieval pieces accurate to the minute.

We found a clue in the nearby town of Lucern. I and some of our party wandered up the many stairs of the town’s clock tower and saw from inside how it operated. I took a picture of the pendulum which you can see as a black circle of iron below.

Just above and to the right of the pendulum weight is an electro-magnet which we witnessed stopped the pendulum for a short duration every few cycles simply by stopping the swing at the top of its arc.

Clearly, a computer is keeping track of the clock getting ahead of real-time and stops it every now and then so it is on the right time again. Brilliant. With this little magnetic addition to the iron clockworks, you can leave the old clock mechanism alone and simply stop the pendulum every now and then so the time is never more than a few seconds off from true perfect time.

Brilliant. Simple. Elegant. Wonderful.

I suspect this is how Zurich does it with their old clocks too. It is just too perfect a solution for them not to do it that way.

Simply beautiful.