A clockmakers' workshop in the Italian Alps
The story starts long before airports: in 1725, in northern Italy, the Solari family was already building tower clocks. Out of that clockmaking tradition came two brothers, Remigio and Fermo Solari, who in 1948 founded their own company in the city of Udine: Solari di Udine.
Remigio was the house's visionary mechanic. His invention: replacing clock hands with rotating flaps — small cards split in half, mounted on a drum, that fall by gravity and display numbers and letters with a clarity no clock hand could match. He patented the system and had a second, even bigger intuition: this wasn't just for telling the time, but for announcing information that changes — trains, flights, destinations.
The design that conquered the world
In the 1950s Solari teamed up with architect and designer Gino Valle, and the collaboration produced a legend: the Cifra 5 clock, awarded the Compasso d'Oro in 1956 — Italy's most prestigious design prize. Its smaller sibling, the Cifra 3, would end up in the design collections of museums around the world. That same year, 1956, Solari sold its first large information board to Liège railway station in Belgium.
What followed was a quiet conquest (well — a rather noisy one): through the 1960s and 70s, "Solari boards" became the standard in airports and stations across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. Decades before the pixel existed, the split-flap was the most modern way on Earth to display living information.
HOW THE MAGIC WORKS
The drum: each cell holds dozens of character flaps mounted on an axle that only turns forward. To reach the letter "R", the drum passes through every letter in between.
The clack: when a flap passes the top of the wheel, gravity wins and it snaps down onto the previous one. That dry snap, multiplied by hundreds of cells, is the famous clack-clack.
The choreography: when the board updates, every cell starts spinning at once, but each one stops on reaching its letter — some sooner, some later. That cascade of stops, ending in silence as the message settles, is the hypnotic moment everyone remembers.
The disappearance
From the 1990s onwards, LED and LCD screens won the battle: no moving parts, no jamming flaps, no motors to grease, minimal maintenance. Airport by airport, station by station, the mechanical boards went dark. Today only a handful remain in service, turned into pilgrimage objects — most famously the original 1962 Solari board of the former TWA terminal at JFK in New York, restored with its authentic mechanics for the TWA Hotel in 2019. People travel to see it (and to hear it) the way you'd visit a monument.
The curious thing is that the screens that replaced them inform just as well… but nobody looks up for them. The split-flap didn't just deliver information: it created a small event every time something changed.
Why it still fascinates us
The split-flap's secret is that it speaks to two senses at once. The movement — hundreds of flaps spinning in cascade — grabs the eye by pure instinct. And the sound announces the change before you can read it: the clack-clack is a promise of news, an "attention, something is about to be said". That mix of anticipation and resolution is pure theatre, and no LED panel has ever replicated it.
Reviving the legend today (no motors, no grease)
Buying a real mechanical board is still possible — and magnificent — if you have several thousand euros and an appetite for maintenance. Building one with 3D printing is a beautiful months-long hobby. But there's a third way that didn't exist a few years ago: recreating it in software on the screen you already own, with the same flipping flaps, the same cascading choreography and the same clack-clack — updatable from your phone, with not a single part to grease.
That's exactly what Flappit does: it turns any TV or screen into a living split-flap board for hotels, restaurants, clinics, offices or your own living room. Our guide covers the three ways to get an airport-style board, with prices and steps. Or try it right now: type a message in the demo and watch it flip with sound.