Workingless Watch

A couple of years back I developed a bordering-on-the-unhealthy fascination with old-fashioned wind-up watches. I bought a ton of them on eBay, and spent hours taking them apart to find out exactly how they worked. To this day I still find the odd tiny spring entangled in the fibres of my carpet. I never did manage to put any of them back together again, but I did gain a real sense of appreciation for those little miracles of engineering. To this day, out of respect for the intricacies of the innards of these watches, I refuse to wear a quartz watch.

Basically, as far as I could gather before the mainspring popped out and shot across the room, what these watches are doing is regulating the output of energy stored in a simple spring. The insides of a mechanical watch consist of lots of tiny, intricate (and very very clever) mechanisms whose only purpose is to quell the enthusiasm of the mainspring, engage it in a finely-balanced tick-tock dance of distraction, and thus ration out it's hyperactivity at a more-or-less regular rate. When you consider that this volatile mainspring has to be actively held in check in a regular fashion while the wrist it's moored to swings and flicks about it's daily life - well, I hope you'll understand the sense of melancholy I feel after a powercut, when all the electric appliances I own flash "00:00" at me. Time has become so cheap these days that the amazing efforts we once had to make to secure it are now taken for granted.

Anyway - in my eBay meanderings I managed to net myself a skeleton watch. When these things are done well, they look truly fantastic - basically, the housings of the various bits and bobs that actually make the watch work are all cut away to the bare minimum, so that, through the face of the watch, you can actually see the mainspring's second-to-second battle with the lever escapement, and the tireless but thankless travails of the balance spring. Unfortunately the one I bought was kind of cheap, and looked a lot better in the photos. Lasted barely an hour beneath my ham-fisted screwdriver as well.

But it had a glass face front and back, and - at certain hours of the day - you could see right through bits of the watch to the wrist beneath. Which was odd. But it did make me wonder if it might be possible to make a watch which seemed to have no workings at all, a watch which was just a single hand moving unaided between two thin sheets of glass...

Take the workings of a watch and make them very small. Obviously, I'd prefer for this to be a mechanical contraption, but at this small a scale that might not be possible. The time-keeping device has to be small enough to fit unobtrusively into the buckle of a standard-looking watch strap. I reckon you could probably get away with it being about a centimetre long and one and a half centimetres wide. And maybe half a centimetre thick. Rather than turning the hand of the watch directly, this mechanism slowly twists a flexible cable that runs unseen inside the strap to the watch face itself.

The face of the watch is just two panes of glass sandwiched almost flat, but with a watch hand inbetween. Small bumps at the base of the hand match up with tiny inverted dimples on the inside centre-point of each pane, so that the hand has a fixed point to revolve around. If that makes sense.

The two panes of glass are both held together and held apart by a metal rim. Now - here's the important bit. Concealed within the circular rim around the watchface is a toothed wheel. The teeth of the wheel point away from the watch, and, crucially, it's made of a non-magnetic material. Well, apart from one single tooth, which is highly magnetic. If I've managed to get anything across at all in that tortuous description, I'm sure you're already ahead of me.

The slowly-twisting concealed wire that runs through the strap of the watch terminates in a bevelled set of tiny teeth, which mesh into a really small mechanism (hidden in the spar that attaches the strap to the face of the watch) that passes the regulated motion on to a kind of propeller screw, which in turn meshes in with and drives the (relatively) big toothed wheel that runs around the circumference of the watch face. The toothed wheel turns, and it's embedded magnet ensures that the floating hand of the watch always (compass-like) tells the right time.

The obvious limitation to this method is that the workingless watch can only have one hand, but that almost suits the minimalist aesthetic it's trying to achieve. You could etch numbers and gradiations onto one of the glass faces, but again, that would kind of detract from the simplicity of the thing.

Unfortunately my scanner's playing up again, so I can't link to any of the back-of-an-envelope illustrations I've drawn. It makes a lot more sense when you see even a sloppy diagram of it. Hopefully you'll catch the gist, though. It was a bugger to write, so it must have been a nightmare to read.

May also cure travel sickness.