Mechanical watches

It's an understatement to say that I have become fascinated with watches, especially mechanical watches. There is something about the precision engineering of a well made piece, its pulsating mechanical harmony, its artistic idea that satisfies the engineer, the scientist and the artist (to whatever degree it exists) in me. Because a mechanical watch really is a work of art since as an object of utility its pretty useless when compared to a simple quartz watch. Following is the story of the mechanical watch in a nutshell.

As I mentioned in my last post on the topic, all clocks and watches have a timekeeping source. In the grandfather clock it is the pendulum and in the mechanical wristwatch it's a balance spring. The Europeans (especially the Swiss and the English) had a huge headstart in designing and making precision mechanical wristwatches with the 2 towering figures of the field being Abraham Louis Breguet and John Arnold. Between the two of them they pretty much invented every important nuance of watchmaking. Everything was hunky dory for the Europeans before the Japanese entered into watchmaking in the 1960s. It was discovered that rather than using a balance spring as a timekeeping source, a quartz crystal can be used instead. Watches made using a quartz crystal would not only be much more simple to make but they would also be extremely cheap and much more accurate than the traditional mechanical watches. Swiss initially decided not to go the way of the quartz and got almost wiped out by the Japanese (Seiko, Citizen) and the Americans (Texas Instruments, National Semiconductors). The Swiss finally caught up in the quartz race through the formation of the Swatchgroup but they also repositioned the traditional mechanical watch as less of a utilitarian timekeeper and more of a thing of beauty.

Master watch-makers would toil away in the Vallée de Joux with their tweezers and their lenses, with their lathes and minuscule files and produce after months and sometimes years of hard-work a single mechanical watch, a stunning piece of craftsmanship and a true labor of love. These watches would have hundreds of microscopic moving parts, precision machined gears, elaborately patterned surfaces (Guilloché), jewel bearings to minimize friction, and automatic self-winding mechanisms. Since it is much more difficult to add additional functionality to a mechanical watch than it is to a digital watch, adding complications became a way to exhibit the artistry of an accomplished watchmaker. And with all those complications and all those gears ticking away in harmony, sometimes the watchmakers make the back and front transparent (Skeleton watch) and the beautiful clockwork of a well made mechanical watch takes its rightful position as a work of art. And you can be sure that horology of mechanical watches is more art than engineering by its vocabulary. It includes fine elegant French sounding names for different complications (Tourbillon, Sonnerie, Rattapante) and the famous watchmakers do their own versions of them. It's like Horowitz performing a Chopin piece or Van Gogh's doing a 'still life'.

And the result of all this is that even though these mechanical watches are not nearly as accurate as a quartz watch that you can get for 20 dollars, they can easily command prices in the high six figure range! And what do you get for all that? The following, for example: