There’s something about the sound of an old railway departure board.
A sudden clatter, hundreds of little flaps turning, and a room full of people looking up to see where the world might take them next.
Long before information appeared silently on screens, it arrived with a little ceremony.
Information, arriving
Split-flap displays were wonderfully peculiar machines.
Behind each character was a rotating mechanism carrying a collection of printed flaps. To change a letter, the mechanism would turn, flipping through characters until the right one fell into place.
Multiply that by a few hundred, and you had something remarkable.
A whole board coming to life. Letters tumbling into place at different speeds. A brief mechanical commotion, followed by stillness.
And then, inevitably, another announcement.
Even something as ordinary as a departure time became a tiny performance. The information didn’t simply appear. It arrived.
The Solari boards
Some of the most recognizable split-flap displays came from Solari di Udine, an Italian company with roots in clockmaking.
Beginning in the 1950s, the company helped establish the split-flap departure board as a fixture of modern travel. Its displays became familiar sights in railway stations and airports, so much so that many people simply knew them as Solari boards.
Other manufacturers developed their own machines, including Pragotron in Central Europe. For decades, these displays quietly became part of the architecture of travel.
Of course, they weren’t particularly quiet.
But they were dependable, ingenious, and unmistakable.
Eventually, electronic screens took their place. Easier to update, and considerably less noisy.
Something was gained in convenience.
Something rather lovely was lost.
Still clacking
Fortunately, not everyone was ready to let the old machines disappear.
Today, companies like Vestaboard are keeping the mechanical tradition alive, bringing real split-flap displays out of railway stations and into homes and workplaces.
They’re beautiful things. A reminder that sometimes the way a message arrives can be just as delightful as the message itself.
If you’ve ever wanted one of these machines on your own wall, take a look at Vestaboard. We’re rather fond of what they’re doing.
A little inspiration
ClackSnack began with an affection for those old machines.
Not simply how they looked, but how they behaved. The anticipation. The clatter. The slightly imperfect choreography of hundreds of individual mechanisms working toward a shared result.
There’s a particular kind of satisfaction in watching something mechanical do exactly what it was built to do.
We wanted to capture a little of that feeling.
So we imagined a display made from hundreds of tiny digital machines. Each with its own character, its own rhythm, its own small part to play.
And somewhere along the way, the idea grew.
What if those machines could do more than tell us when a train was leaving?
What if they could help us tell stories, make things, play games, start conversations, or simply bring a little unexpected delight into an ordinary afternoon?
That’s the idea behind ClackSnack.
A small tribute to the machines that came before it, and an invitation to see what else they might inspire.
After all, a display that once brought people information might just help bring people together.
A little more history
- Solari di Udine: company history
- Split-flap displays on Wikipedia
- Solari di Udine on Wikipedia
- Vestaboard