While Andy Hoffman reports on the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry's warning that exports outpace demand, it's the peek behind the scenes at the tools Montblanc favours for pressing the hands onto its watches, more than the long-overdue depression in new watch sales, that piqued my interest.
Brandon Moore, reporting for Watches by SJX, provides an inside look at Biver's quaint watch finishing and assembly facilities in the Swiss countryside on the outskirts of Geneva.
Raw components for their chiming tourbillon are supplied by Le Cercle des Horlogers, with Dubois Dépraz taking care of the brand's automatic movement components, and Efteor responsible for delivering the cases.
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.
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.
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.
Entropy, as defined by Rudolph Clausius and expounded upon by Ludwig Boltzmann, whose grandfather was a watchmaker, is sometimes referred to by physicists as "time's arrow" or the "arrow of time".
The equation is a distillation of the second law of thermodynamics. Delta S is always greater than or equal to zero (ΔS ≥ 0). The state variable, S, being a measurable and calculable quantity in an isolated process that increases or remains the same but never decreases.
The second law asserts that thermodynamic processes occur in a specific direction. Heat energy passes from hot bodies to cold bodies, not the other way around.
As Carlo Rovelli phrased it in The Order of Time:
It is the only equation of fundamental physics that knows any difference between past and future. The only one that speaks of the flowing of time.
Time passes in the same direction that entropy increases.
A photograph of the interior of Hans Wilsdorf's office at Rolex, most likely taken in the early 1960s.
Jake Ehrlich believes the photo to be of a recreation of Hans Wilsdorf's office in the original company museum.
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.
