Jon Edwards

Christopher Butler on design:

The most innovative solutions often come from designers who are aware of conventions but not beholden to them. They know the rules well enough to break them purposefully. They understand context but aren’t limited by precedent. They’ve cultivated the discipline to look away from existing solutions when it matters most — during the critical phases of ideation and development when uniqueness of vision is most vulnerable to external influence.

When we constantly reference existing solutions, our work inevitably gravitates toward the mean. We solve for expectations rather than needs.

Great design requires both looking and looking away — studying and ignoring, learning and forgetting, absorbing and creating. The magic happens not just in what we choose to see, but in what we deliberately choose not to see.

Nora Atkinson, writing from the Museum of Craft & Design in San Francisco:

There’s something powerful in working with your hands, in the rhythm of making, in shaping the world through touch and attention. Craft has long offered a feeling of agency to those pushed to the margins, a feeling of continuity to those in chaos, a feeling of accomplishment to those who dedicate their attention. It reminds us that we’re still capable of creating something beautiful—even when things feel uncertain or broken.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

An impressively engineered and well-crafted variable-speed metronome. The Tempo Rubato was created by Gaku Okada, a recent graduate of Japan's Hiko Mizuno College of Jewellery and apprentice to both Hajime Asaoka and Jiro Katayama.

Having had numerous stakeholders over the years, Robert Greubel & Stephen Forsey have recently reconsolidated control of Greubel Forsey.

Fantastic news for this independent brand.

Brian Klaas on resilience over optimization. Drawing life lessons from nacre—the same iridescent material that imbues each mother-of-pearl watch dial with its unique luster.

Employing little more than a rusty, old tin of pipe tobacco and a handful of household items, Rob Morrison, in a clip from an old episode of Australia’s Curiosity Show, demonstrates how to create an isochronous curve.

Isochronism is an integral aspect of crafting a reliable timekeeper and you can see precisely why in the behavior of the balls that Morrison places along the curve.

Rain Noe, writing for Core77, breaks down several key differences between some of the more common 300 series and 400 series stainless steel alloys.

Daniel Valuch, of CERN, invents and evaluates the outcome of adding a “Chain Controlled Oscillator” (a.k.a. CCO) into a highly-precise Elektročas HH3 clock fitted with an Invar pendulum.

The CCO mechanism itself is tied into a cesium atomic clock, enabling the outfitted Elektročas HH3 to be regulated to stratum 1 levels of accuracy in near realtime.

Google (which acquired FitBit, which previously acquired Pebble) has open sourced the operating system for Pebble Watch.

Using Einstein’s E=mc², PBS breaks down why the energy you impart to a mechanical watch by winding it increases its mass.

Gav Free, of The Slo Mo Guys, takes an up close look at his Omega Speedmaster Dark Side of the Moon in slow motion.

10,000 frames per second is where things start to get interesting and I wish Gavin had been able to dial things in even slower.

The ricochet action between the gears of the sliding clutch mechanism hint at similarly violent, sub-millisecond interactions happening between the pallet fork and the escape wheel. The audio waveform of the interaction at the escapement, which can readily be captured at at an even higher sample rate, also hints at the notable forces that are at play here. There is an old, internal, slow-motion video showcasing the interaction of the escapement that circulates around Rolex every now and then. To recount the words of one watchmaker, "It looks like a train wreck."

The fact that we have so adeptly learned to harness and control this energy with such a high degree of repeatability and precision remains remarkable.

Gav's comment shortly after the eleven minute mark, about only leaving the brightest of the lights he employed on for a few seconds at a time so as not to cook the watch, was warranted and even a bit tardy. It was clear from the close-up shots of the escapement earlier in the footage that nearly all of the lubricant at the pallets had already evaporated, most likely from heat given off by the large, primary spotlight. Speaking from experience, having filmed a number of close-up shots under powerful lights back in the day for Alliance Horlogère, it doesn't take long for watch lubricants to evaporate under that kind of exposure.

The word “lens” is derived from “lentil” as early hand-ground, glass lenses were designed to magnify and their double-convex shape resembled that of a lentil.

Independent watchmaker, Andreas Strehler, in an interview with Pascal Brandt at Monochrome:

I’m not very influenced by the watch market. I feel more like an artist who creates to surprise the public.

Mechanical watches are like music. Gears have been known for centuries, like the musical notes that have been defined since Bach. We can create a new mechanism every day, like new songs that can be composed and sung.