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Comment by BenjiWiebe | Hacker News Reader

I have never seen a round clock with hands that ticks over a minute! And I look at clocks. Most that have second hands tick over seconds, though.

Where do you live?

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In movies when the villain has placed the hero in the mechanism of a clock-tower, the minute hand seems to always tick over a minute. I don't recall ever seeing it in real-life, but I don't look at clocks in clock-towers that often.

I have a round analog clock with a particularly strange arrangement: it has a second hand (that ticks every second), and it has a minute hand that only moves every fifteen seconds.

(It's a radio-controlled clock: it has the second and minute hand on separate motors presumably because syncing to the actual time if there were only a motor for the second hand like a conventional analog clock would take too long (and probably make determining position more complicated). There is no independent motor for the hour hand, so it does have to roll the minute hand around to move that one.)

I see these clocks often in railway stations (I live in India). There is no seconds hand. The minute and hour hands move in clicks, not smoothly like most clocks.

The clocks in German railway stations have second hands which 'click'. It's particulary fun how the seconds hand runs slightly fast so that it can pause on the minute, waiting momentarily for a synchronization pulse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMSBJzN35u0

Swiss stations are similar but have contiuously moving second hands. I could have sworn this clock characteristic was indeed called 'Swiss motion' but I can't find any such reference on the Web...

There’s some very neat designs that only tick the minute hand once per minute, as it’s significantly more power efficient to do so. You just power the hand once per minute, as opposed to continuously driving the hand in small increments.

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