I always feel sad when an elegant labour-intensive product is replaced in the market by an automated-production item.

I refer to the self-winding watches well-off people used to wear a generation ago.

A pendulum in a circular track and responding to arm-wrist movement kept them wound. They were masterpieces of mechanical technology.

Cheap battery-driven watches most people can afford have replaced them. Halfbaked query : Is there a place in today's world for reviving the pendulum system as a wrist/ankle powered battery charger for one or two of those button-sized batteries?

After-thought : StarTrek-style matter-replicators having arrived [astoundingly - New Scientist 30 September], maybe we will "choose" to wear a replicated self-winder!
-- rayfo, Oct 03 2000

Seiko http://www.seikousa.com/
Look under "Kinetic," rayfo-san. [centauri, Oct 03 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]

I am a big fan of devices that derive their power from incidental movement on the part of the user. These watched still exist, in updated form. Some of them even have transparent backs so you can see the winding mechanism. I find it hard to believe that you've never seen an ad for these. I'll try to find a link for you, but the breeze I hear in the trees as I type is probably a band of ninja-like halfbakers already wresting that info from the clutchs of the 'net.
-- centauri, Oct 03 2000


Thanks centauri. I made a hash of this posting. Half asleep I couldn't make "edit" work for some reason.

And I'd quite forgotten seeing an ad for Seiko self-winders last time I was in a plane - ten years ago.

However the main point was about battery charging.

I'd like your comment on that aspect.
-- rayfo, Oct 03 2000


I think everyone should wear suits with little generators at the joints. When moving the joints you would run the generator which would feed power into a battery pack. Then you use the pack to charge any of your little personal connectedness devices. I think the generators would provide something of a counterforce to your movement, too, giving you a constant mini-workout whenever you moved. Or, people might just stop moving.

I'm not sure how much energy you could glean in this way.
-- centauri, Oct 03 2000


I remember the insult popular at the time the self winding watches were popular was, "I bet your watch is wound up to next year."

With rayfo's idea it could be "Carry on like that and you'll electrocute yourself."
-- Alcin, Oct 04 2000


centauri, I had an idea similar to yours for astronauts, giving them some resistance in the joints to keep muscles and bones from atrophying during extended weightless periods. Might also be a big hit with the physical culture crowd.

If you could find a flexible enough material that generated electricity through expansion/contraction, you could make long underwear that charged your electric socks!
-- Scott_D, Oct 05 2000


On your afterthought: _New Scientist_ gushing about (what's really pretty old) RP technology notwithstanding, "StarTrek-style matter replicators" have most definitely not arrived.
-- egnor, Oct 05 2000


Electric socks?
-- salmon, Dec 15 2000


The seiko kenetic is just such a watch as you describe, a motion powered quartz watch with the accuracy of an electronic timepiece but without the hassle of batteries. I don't know if it works by pendulum though, I vaguely recall something about a piezo-electric mechanism...
-- BertieWooster, Jul 17 2001


Those self-winders (the older, purely mechanical kind) are referred to as 'automatics' in the horological vernacular.
-- zen_tom, Jan 16 2007



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