An insight into the consumer heart of darkness of watches

The peacock has his tail, and it seems humans have jewellery. In general the march of technology has made many things cheaper and sometimes better, though often not more durable. However, it seems the humble wristwatch is not one of these things, here we have a dude inquiring about finding good value in a watch for £8000. Don’t get me wrong – there are some sorts for whom maybe £8000 is about value. Say you are the crew of Apollo 13, you are SOL when the tank explodes in space, you are on 20% of electrical power, and you need a 5 minute burn to speed you on your way round the moon before your ticket to ride expires with the air. You have two chances to get this right. And the knob of the Command Module Interval Timer comes off in your hand. Then you might be grateful that someone spent a shitload of money on a watch that could survive takeoff. £8000 well spent, you get to see you wife and kids again. Early twenties, working for a REIT, looking to be individual in the stuff that you buy rather than the person you are, well, not so much.

I was recently on a retreat where they aren’t keen on mobile phones. I’m with them there, I don’t tote a mobile most of the time, although often I have one with me when I am out, even if it is mainly switched off. I discovered it’s far too easy to switch it on in a pocket just by bending down, pressing the button on the side that starts it all up. I get to be that tosser with the mobile, and I don’t like it, even if it is just the Galaxy startup sound on low.

A mobile is an okay way of telling the time, though I am still shocked that mobiles don’t update the clock from the mobile network, or failing that use NTP. But I have discovered that I want to go back to an old way of knowing the time, which used to be known as a watch. I have two, both from 30 years ago. One was my own, an automatic mechanical watch, because 1986 was still just in the time when it was cheaper to buy an analogue watch[ref]digital display watches were cheaper[/ref] as a mechanical one than a quartz watch and just about the time when mechanical cheap watches became serviceably accurate – the ones of my schooldays would gain or lose five minutes a day. The Seiko was good enough for that much a week ISTR.

I could use this if I could wind it manually, but I’d have to wear it for half a day before it would run reliably

I would use the Seiko but I don’t want to wear a watch all the time. So it would run down and stop, and generally be a pain, because for some reason I can’t wind it manually, so I’d have to shake it about and hope the mainspring has enough energy to run, that’s too much trouble for occasional use. Plus it’s the 21st century, FFS. William Gibson was right. There is no point to a mechanical watch, which is exactly why they sell for shitloads of money. Because humans are funny like that. The other one has some sentimental value because it was given to my Dad on his retirement.

This works – but the trouble is it eats batteries, they last less than a year. I took it to be changed a couple of times but after that I’ve had enough.

What I basically want of a watch is battery powered – I can’t be fussed with winding them, and the mighty quartz crystal pretty much solved the drifting out problem, you can check a quartz watch monthly and never be more than a couple of minutes off. Analogue, because I can easily compute 20 minutes from now in a third of the sweep. I confess as a retiree it is sometimes nice to know what day it is as well as the date. I had a browse of Amazon, and after a couple of minutes I lost the desire to look any more, because the paradox of choice was doing my head in. I did since discover one should change watch batteries yearly or maybe every other year. This is to forestall the blighters spewing out sludge, the idea seems to be change the batteries before they run flat. I didn’t know that, though it applies to other sorts of batteries I guess.

There are two other techniques, that replace the battery with a supercap. Either charged by movement energy like the automatic mechanical watches of old or by solar. The latter sounds like it could eliminate the not wearing it all the time and the battery leakage problem. So if my investment in a little bit of IPA and a new battery fails, that seems to be the way to go. Shame that people still putz about with a mechanical ring for the date, which is fundamentally a digital display. It wouldn’t be too hard to use a LCD display for the day and date, which would save mucking around with the date on months shorter than 31.

a bit too industrial IMO. I am also disturbed by the concept of Sunday the 36th…

Casio do these, but I can’t really cope with the idea of a plastic resin case. I don’t really care how ugly a mobile phone is, but a resin watch will offend me regularly with its gauche machismo. I am too old to join the military. I appreciate this is a matter of taste, but it isn’t mine. And I really don’t want a watch that even thinks of making a noise. Five alarms is five too many. It seems nobody simply takes all the mechanical gubbins of showing the day and date and swaps it for a LCD of the same size. Perhaps they can’t make LCD displays small enough and sharp enough, though with watches there seems to be some kudos in doing bizarre things mechanically that really should either not be done at all, or done electronically.

The paradox of choice makes me think better

A retiree should be insanely curious about the world. One is simply to sharpen the saw, the other is because he has the luxury of time, to really get into something because it is there. One of the incidental values of being curious is that it leans against the learned helplessness of living in an unrepairable consumer world. And so I thought ‘Self, for thirty odd years an electronics engineer, what is the obvious most likely cause of a watch working, but running batteries down excessively? Well, it is what battery operated devices left in a drawer for years have always suffered from – a battery leaks and leaves gunk behind, which adds a slight load. You don’t notice that with a radio or a power drill, but a 373 battery is tiny, so the added load is much bigger in proportion to the capacity of a watch battery[ref]leakage is a much bigger issue than I’d expected. After I got the replacement and pressed it into place with my fingers, I noticed the bit on the invoice where it said “please refrain from pre-testing watch and coin cell batteries, and only use plastic tools (no fingers!) to insert battery wherever possible to avoid premature failure of battery cells” Oops. Oh well, I will know next time, eh ;)[/ref]. I confess I’d never really thought about a watch battery leaking, I have never seen a leaking button cell. I just didn’t think it happened.

So I popped the back off this and observed that there was indeed gunk from a previous battery. Not only that, but neither the place in LA who had swapped the first battery in 1993 nor the well-known high-street jeweller’s in Ipswich  had seen fit to inform me of this (the battery I extracted was clean, so not at fault).

leakage from an old battery and corroded terminal, easily visible to me, though I had to really push the contrast in the photo.

A tissue and some isopropyl alcohol were my friend, so writing this post saved me the price of a new watch, by galvanising me to get off my backside and remain challenged and keep learning. It isn’t that I am short of the money for a replacement watch, and indeed if I miss having the day display then I will buy one. But  all H Samuel had to say is “we will change the battery for you for £5, but there is evidence of leakage and we recommend a clean of the compartment if you find battery life is reduced, that would be £25”. This took me less than five minutes [ref]this is apparently not the correct way to clean this off, but it will do for me[/ref] it would have been an easy £20 profit guys! Even if they didn’t want the profit warming me up to the issue wouldn’t have left me pissed off thinking they sold me an old battery when it expired in less than a year.

A visit to the bizarre form over function world of Consumerism with a capital C

When I was at school, the office used mechanical adding machines, because electronic calculators only started to appear in the mid 1970s. When the hell was the last time you saw a mechanical adding machine or a slide rule in an office? There is absolutely no reason for the mechanical watch to exist, perhaps save in the West Virginia Radio Quiet Zone or the like. The sheer exuberant impracticality of the mechanical watch and bizarre fetishes like the tourbillon have become mobile jewellery in themselves – Blancpain tells us

The tourbillon compensates for running errors due to gravity by mounting the balance wheel in a rotating cage. Equipped with a tourbillon, your watch runs with greater accuracy.

Well, yeah, but not half as much as throwing the bugger out and swapping it for a quartz crystal would.

Call a tourbillon a complication? THIS is a complication. By I, Mogi, CC BY 2.5

Okay, so you lose out on the pretty rotating device, but the accuracy wins out. I don’t know why they don’t get rid of the dial altogether then and have a living, breathing mass of rotating and shifting whatnots in a crystal round case. An orrery or an astrolabe, maybe an Antikythera mechanism would suit Sir to a T, and our young REIT worker could use his iPhone to tell the time while dazzling his boss and clients with his metropolitan sophistication and one-of-a-kind-ness

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Meanwhile, the Chinese can send me a working analogue quartz watch from Shenzen for less than three quid, delivered. That’s only twice the price of my replacement battery, although the aesthetics suck slightly (but not as much as the Casio IMO). Ain’t consumer capitalism amazing…