A Short History of the Flipboard

About

The flipboard is older than most of the people who remember it. Before the LED departure screens, before the digital clocks at the gates, there was a quiet Italian mechanism that turned the act of waiting into a kind of music.

Pesariis · Udine · Liège · New York

I. A Village in the Carnia Mountains

Solari is a clockmaking name. It begins in 1725 in Pesariis, a stone village high in the Friulian Alps, where a family workshop called itself the old and prized factory of tower clocks. For two centuries the Solari brothers fitted bell-towers across Italy with their movements. Time, in their hands, was something you heard before you saw.

II. Two Brothers, One Invention

In 1948, brothers Fermo and Remigio Solari moved the business down the mountain to the city of Udine. They wanted to display time, not just keep it. Remigio worked out a mechanism in which numbers were printed on small hinged flaps stacked on a roller. An electromagnet released the top flap at every interval, and it fell away to reveal the next. It was simple, mechanical, and astonishingly reliable. He called it the split-flap.

III. The Cifra Series

The Solari brothers found a designer who understood that an industrial object could also be a quiet kind of art. The architect Gino Valle (1923 to 2003) began working with the company in 1954. Together with the Belgian engineer John Myer and, later, the typographer Massimo Vignelli, they built a series of clocks called Cifra, Italian for digit. The Cifra 5, four vertical pallets of ten numbers each, won the Compasso d'Oro in 1956. The Cifra 3, smaller and more beautiful, was patented in the mid-1960s and entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

I do not make objects. I establish relationships.Gino Valle

IV. The Boards Begin to Flip

The same year the Cifra 5 won its medal, Solari sold its first moving sign to Liège-Guillemins railway station in Belgium. The mechanism scaled up. Each character position became a stack of forty or so flaps with every letter and digit and a handful of glyphs; under each position, a small motor; behind the whole grid, a central controller. When a train was rescheduled or a flight changed gates, hundreds of flaps moved at once, with that unmistakable cascading clack.

Through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the Solari board became the standard at airports and train stations across Europe and North America: Milan, Frankfurt, Brussels, Bologna, Charles de Gaulle, JFK, Penn Station, Philadelphia 30th Street. It became, for a generation of travelers, the sound of going somewhere.

V. The Quiet That Came After

The boards started coming down in the 1990s. LED panels were brighter, cheaper, and could show a gate change without a small motor turning a stack of plastic. By the late 2010s only a handful remained in service. The TWA terminal at JFK kept theirs and built a hotel around it. Bologna kept theirs almost to the end. Frankfurt's was photographed thousands of times in the week before it was switched off.

The departure board does not need to be mechanical. Information moves the same way either way. But the flipboard is a way of saying: this is happening, pay attention, the world is about to be a slightly different place. A character takes a moment to settle. You have time to read it.

VI. Why We Made This

Solari, the app you are reading about, is a small tribute. It is not affiliated with Solari S.p.A. of Udine, and it is not a replica of any product they make. We just wanted to bring something we love about the original boards, the deliberateness, the noise, the little ceremony of a message landing, into the place where most of our messages live now.

A board between you and a friend. 132 tiles. One note at a time. No threads, no notifications, no infinite scroll. Just the slow, mechanical pleasure of writing something worth flipping for.

Not affiliated with Solari S.p.A. · Made with respect, and with gratitude to the people of Pesariis.