Live dial · sweep or tick
Analog Clock
A large clock face showing your local time, with a red station-clock second hand. Built for projectors, classrooms and wall displays — press full screen and it fills the wall.
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Press F for full screen. Settings are remembered on this device.
Reading a dial
How to Teach the Clock Face
Children learn dials in a fairly reliable order, and trying to skip a stage is usually what makes it stick badly.
O'Clock First, with One Hand
Turn the second hand off and start with the hour hand alone. When it points straight at a number and the long hand is at the top, that is that o'clock. Nothing else needs explaining yet.
Half Past, Then Quarters
Half past is the easiest next step because the shape is obvious — the long hand points straight down. Quarter past and quarter to follow from the same visual logic, since the dial divides into quarters you can see.
Five-Minute Counting
Now the numbers change meaning: the 3 is both three o'clock and fifteen minutes. This is the genuinely hard part, and it needs counting round the dial in fives out loud, repeatedly.
Minutes, Then Seconds
Once counting in fives is secure, the small marks between the numbers make sense as single minutes. Turn the second hand back on last, when everything else is solid.
The design
Why This Dial Looks the Way It Does
The Swiss Station Clock
Hans Hilfiker designed it in 1944 for Swiss Federal Railways: black bars, no clutter, and a red paddle for the seconds borrowed from the guard's signalling disc. It is one of the most legible clock faces ever made, which is why it is in the Museum of Modern Art and why it is the model for this one.
The Pause at the Top
On a real Swiss station clock the second hand takes about 58.5 seconds to go round, then waits at twelve for an electrical pulse sent from a master clock. Every station in the country therefore changes minute simultaneously, which matters a great deal when trains depart on the minute.
The Hour Hand Moves Constantly
It does not jump from hour to hour. At twenty to five it sits two thirds of the way from four to five. Getting this wrong is the most common error in drawn clock faces, and it confuses children who have learned to read the hour hand's position rather than the nearest number.
Sweep Versus Tick
The sweeping option updates many times a second for a smooth glide; the tick option steps once per second like a quartz movement. Neither is more accurate — the underlying time is identical — so pick whichever you find less distracting in the corner of a room.
Answers
Analog Clock Questions
Sweep and tick, teaching children, station clocks and wall displays.
Why does the second hand sweep on some clocks and tick on others?
Because of how the movement is driven. A cheap quartz movement pulses a stepper motor once a second, which produces the familiar tick. A mechanical watch beats several times a second, which looks like a smooth sweep from a distance but is really a very fast tick. This page offers both, since which one people find calming is entirely a matter of taste.
What is the point of an analog clock when digits are more precise?
Speed of reading, and proportion. A dial shows you how much of the hour is left as a shape, without any arithmetic. That is why they persist in classrooms, kitchens and stations: nobody looking at a platform clock wants to know it is 14:37, they want to know the train is nearly here.
Is this useful for teaching children to tell the time?
That is the most common reason people ask for it. Full screen on a projector gives the whole class one dial to read from, and the numerals and second hand can be turned off to make it harder as they improve. Set it beside the digital clock and the mapping between the two becomes visible.
Why do the hands sit slightly differently from a real clock?
They should not. The hour hand moves continuously rather than jumping between hours, which is what a real clock does — at half past four the hour hand sits halfway between four and five, not on the four. Clocks drawn with a jumping hour hand are a common mistake in illustrations.
What is the Swiss railway clock?
The station clock designed by Hans Hilfiker in 1944 for Swiss Federal Railways, with a red paddle for the second hand. Its most distinctive feature is that the second hand completes its sweep in about 58.5 seconds and then pauses at the top until the minute signal arrives, so every station changes minute at exactly the same instant. The design is the reason this whole site uses a red seconds marker.
Can I leave it running on a wall display?
Yes, and full screen removes every control. On an OLED panel, be aware that a bright static dial held in exactly one position for many hours can cause retention. Rotating between this and one of the animated backgrounds avoids it.
Does it show the right time if my computer is wrong?
No. Like every clock on this site, it reads your device's system clock. If that is wrong, so is this. Turning on automatic date and time fixes it in almost every case.