Favag_clamshell_front2.jpg
Favag_clock_hinge1.jpg
veeb_clock_driver.webp
Favag_clamshell_front2.jpg
Favag_clock_hinge1.jpg
veeb_clock_driver.webp

Swiss Favag Clock - 1940s

CHF 895.00
Rehomed

Some clocks tell the time quietly, in the background. This one asks to be looked at first, and told the time second. Flurina is a FAVAG wall clock, built in the 1940s in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, when the company was still perfecting the electric clock systems it would later become known for. Silence, then once a minute, a single tick, the kind of sound a clock only makes when there's real mechanism behind it.

The tiered metal frame, clamshell opening, and brass hinge give it a distinctly industrial presence: heavier and more deliberate than a typical wall clock, built to be handled and opened, not just glanced at.

Pair it with the included VEEB Clock Driver: give it your wifi details once, no app, nothing to learn, and an 80-year-old mechanism keeps internet-accurate time from then on, entirely on its own.

This is a single vintage piece, not a reproduction, so once it's found a home there won't be another exactly like it.

Some clocks tell the time quietly, in the background. This one asks to be looked at first, and told the time second. Flurina is a FAVAG wall clock, built in the 1940s in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, when the company was still perfecting the electric clock systems it would later become known for. Silence, then once a minute, a single tick, the kind of sound a clock only makes when there's real mechanism behind it.

The tiered metal frame, clamshell opening, and brass hinge give it a distinctly industrial presence: heavier and more deliberate than a typical wall clock, built to be handled and opened, not just glanced at.

Pair it with the included VEEB Clock Driver: give it your wifi details once, no app, nothing to learn, and an 80-year-old mechanism keeps internet-accurate time from then on, entirely on its own.

This is a single vintage piece, not a reproduction, so once it's found a home there won't be another exactly like it.

Who Made The Clock?

FAVAG, Switzerland

A Timeline of FAVAG

  • MOBATIME 2002
    Moser-Baer introduces MOBATIME as its brand name. The Neuchâtel line ends up in Sumiswald, the Emmental village that also gave Switzerland its railway station clock. Moser-Baer
  • The clock division changes hands 1989
    W. Moser-Baer AG and J. Bosshard SA jointly acquire FAVAG's clock division in Neuchâtel. The rest of Ascom FAVAG stays where it is; it is the clockmaking that leaves. Mobatime
  • Ascom 1987
    Hasler, Autophon and Zellweger Telecommunications merge to form Ascom, a group of some thirteen thousand people built to face the coming liberalisation of the Swiss telecoms market. FAVAG becomes Ascom FAVAG. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz
  • Hasler takes over 1932
    Hasler of Bern takes over FAVAG. The Neuchâtel works keep their name and their clocks, but the independence that began with Hipp is over. Oscahr, Université de Strasbourg
  • FAVAG SA 1927
    Favarger & Cie SA is renamed FAVAG, short for Fabrik elektrischer Apparate AG. The name on your clock dates from here. Oscahr
  • Favarger & Cie 1908
    The Hipp name comes off the letterhead nineteen years after he left. Albert Favarger runs the firm as director until 1920. A bankruptcy follows, and the business is continued under the FAVAG name. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, Science Museum Group
  • Peyer & Favarger, Succ. de M. Hipp 1889
    At seventy-five Hipp hands the factory to his engineers Albert Favarger and A. de Peyer, and the works carry their names alongside his for the next nineteen years. He moves to Fluntern to be near his daughter, and dies there in 1893. Biography, Science Museum Group
  • Minute jumpers 1869
    Hipp patents the impulse system for slave clocks known as minute jumpers, which steps every dial on a network forward together at the top of each minute. It is why a building full of clocks can agree with itself.
  • Electric clocks reach Geneva 1862
    Hipp installs an electric clock system in Geneva. Master-and-slave networks go on to spread across Europe, into stations, schools, hospitals and spa towns on every continent.
  • Fabrique des télégraphes M. Hipp 1860
    Hipp leaves the federal workshop and founds his own telegraph and electrical apparatus factory in Neuchâtel. It turns quickly to electric clock networks, and to distributing exact time down telegraph wires from 1863. Over forty years he brings more than twenty inventions to maturity, including the astronomical pendulum of the Neuchâtel observatory in 1877. Deutsche Biographie, Biography
  • Director in Bern 1852
    The Swiss government appoints Hipp head of production at the federal telegraph workshop in Bern, where he stays eight years. He was German, and remained so all his life, which did not stop the Swiss calling him their Edison. Wikipedia, Biography
  • The chronoscope 1850
    Hipp builds an instrument that measures intervals to a thousandth of a second, timed not by a pendulum but by a metal reed vibrating a thousand times a second. Armies used it to clock projectiles. Psychologists used it to try to measure the speed of thought. Science Museum Group
  • The Hipp toggle 1843
    A miller's son from Blaubeuren, lame since a childhood fall, apprenticed to a clockmaker at sixteen, Matthäus Hipp shows his toggle mechanism at an exhibition in Berlin, described only as a clock with its movement below the pendulum. He had worked out the principle by 1834 and fitted it to a clock in Reutlingen the year before. Sotheby's, Wikipedia