Watch This…
Orient Blog talking about their first digital watch. I remember that. My paternal grandfather, known to us as Grandpa Basil, had one. I remember seeing him wearing it. Placing it on the shelf. I’d touch it to turn on the display. Had to be a major battery hog as that tech had not gained the efficiency of today’s battery sippin watches.
By the time I was in my teens, digital watches were produced by the millions and sold for $5 at your local grocery stores at the time. These watches had little light bulbs that turned on at the push of a button. I wonder how much longer my batteries would have lasted had I not turned that light on every 5 minutes I was awake at night in the dark.
I have a penchant for mechanical watches. This is why I have yet to get into the whole smart watch thing. Old me? Pre-2000 me? I would’ve been all over that shit. Early adopter of old PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants, some are old enough to remember that revolution). Apple Newton. REX. Palm Pilot. Palm III. Palm V. Palm LifeDrive. Dell Axiom. I had them all. 3rd Person in line for the original iPhone. Even that Casio watch databank/calculator. I was addicted to tech, and deep into computers, of which, I had them all. Mac (both pre and post X). Linux. Windows NT. IBM’s OS/2. Windows 2000. Remember the early days of the Computer Shopper magazine? The big one. 2 inches thick. I can still smell it. Holy shit that made me hard. Going through that thing. Piecing together systems. Proudly seeing my BBS listed in there. Getting a major discount from U.S. Robotics if you used and advertised that shiny Sportster on your BBS. Quite the nerd, I was.
These days I don’t even have a computer I use for personal use. I consider myself fortunate that way. That spot was relegated by my iPad Mini many years ago, currently held by an iPad Air. Personally, my needs are very small. Email. Browsing. Reading. Writing. Planning our camping trips, which really falls under the “Browsing” category. The majority of these needs can be met on my phone now.
Post 2000 me developed a greater love for regular old wrist watches. A couple contain quartz movements. Movado Museum Watch SE. Seiko Coutura Solar. My real love is mechanical movement watches. Auto. Wind. It doesn’t matter to me.
The watch company that truly stole my heart is Orient and Orient Star. Orient Star is to Orient what Grand Seiko is to Seiko. Orient is the small sibling to Seiko. Their parent company is Epson. Orient focuses on boutique watches and from what I’ve seen, things that get truly noticed and loved about Orient usually end up on Seiko watches.
My favorite is the Grand Seiko Heritage Spring Drive. A conjoined movement of quartz and mechanical. In sum, it operates off a spring. But instead of that spring “tick tocking” that escape, or balance wheel, the Spring Drive moves that wheel in one direction only. This is what gives that second hand a smooth flow without any ticks or tocks. When that regular watch wheels goes back and forth providing the sweep of the second hand, it is allowing that spring to slowly unwind. But you want it to unwind in a controlled enough manner that it can do it in a steady release, keeping time. On the Spring Drive, there is this mini alternator that the wheel turns to produce an electric charge that then powers a quartz for the purpose of providing a calibrating frequency. This frequency is then compared to the frequency of the mechanical wheel by putting on the the breaks – literally slowing down the wheel, forcing it to keep perfect time at least when measured in short durations like months. Regular mechanical watches – good watches – that keep good time are measured in +/- 5-15 seconds per day.
That is the beauty of the Spring Drive. It keeps perfect time. I set it to the second based off the time on my phone, which is then kept in time itself through the servers. These servers are kept in time by the atomic clock in Colorado. A month later, the second hand of the Grand Seiko is still in perfect sync with the “second hand” on the small clock of my phone display.
This is why I can’t have nice things, like an Apple Watch. I have too many other watches that I love to wear and complement my Hawaiian shirts. Like today’s shirt/watch combo – a custom Islander watch with a Seiko NH36 movement inside, which is really just an unbranded version of Seiko’s 4R36. That’s the same movement inside my latest Seiko field watch, the SRPG33.