Last week New York City's Grand Central Station celebrated its centennial. And one of the little facts dug up during the celebration has to do with the terminal's iconic clocks - they always run a minute fast. These few extra seconds prevent complete chaos from breaking out the grand marble halls, and we're here to tell you how.

Swarms of passengers running around the polished marble floors of Grand Central Station, pushing every which way to make that last off-peak train, is a recipe for disaster. But with a simple horological trick, Grand Central Station has managed to get itself ranked as having the fewest wipeouts of any train station in the country. Not too bad for a place that sees approximately 750,000 people pass through it daily.

By setting the clocks forward one minute, passengers always have a little more time than they think they do, and people become trained to slow down a bit. Grand Central Station doesn't want to keep this extra minute a secret - in fact they want just the opposite. "Fast clocks make for slower passengers," says The Atlantic reporter Megan Garber. To complete the system, the posted schedules are actually synched to this false time - all trains actually leave the station a minute later than "scheduled."

Story via The Atlantic Image via Wikipedia