Is your tool watch decreasing your mental agility?

Occasionally, it's nice to wear a high-quality vintage watch. It tells the time and nothing else. So any activities to do with time required some mental effort, maybe even a little mental arithmetic in the form of base 60 addition or subtraction. Such effort is good exercise for the mind, thereby keeping it in good condition.

The other day, I was wearing this beautiful watch:


(more pictures here).

Suddenly, my dear wife wanted to be reminded of something in 55 minutes' time. Without thinking. I rushed to my collection, strapped this one on and set the count-down timer accordingly. Didn't even have to think about it. 55 minutes later, sure enough it beeped. "Why is this watch beeping?", I asked. Duh!


(see more tool watches here).

When I think back to my youth, "55 minutes" was about an hour, something easily handled by the mind and confirmed by a couple of glances at the Elgin or whatever. The seconds hand's main duty was to confirm that your watch was running. At school, we learned our multiplication tables by rote up to 12x and we also learned how to do long division on the back of a fag packet. Those were the days when shopkeepers and counter clerks added up long columns of figures on sales receipts and general ledgers with nary a calculator in sight. Discounts or markups were figured mentally.

I would say that progress in the tools of mankind, not just watches, has reduced our mental agility quite considerably. What say you?

Best regards,

xpatUSA

Review of a Cheap Watch

I've read a lot of reviews of quite expensive or rare watches. But sometimes a cheapie comes along that represents an awesome value for money. One of my many watches was bought on eBay when it's auction was just about to close at $2.99 and no bids. $2.99??!!! I just couldn't resist snapping it up! SWMBO took a liking to it, and I've just installed it's second battery. Seems like it was part of a promotion for Time Magazine. Here it is:


Nice 32mm diameter steel case with a large-ish 25mm black dial. The dial sports 24-hr numerals and luminous 1-12 hour numerals. The obligatory "Mercedes" hands, a la Explorer, are also luminous. As you can see below, the "Time" logo is in the same font as the well-known magazine cover:


Moving on, it came with nice strap and the back proudly declared it to have a "JAPAN MOVT":


I think it's a PC21, the three-hands version of the incredibly prolific PC20. Otto Frei is currently selling PC21's for $4.95, should I ever need one. These little movements, far removed from the revered ETA/ESA offerings, are remarkably reliable and accurate for what they are - the electronic version of the Timex model 24.

The padded leather strap is unashamedly of oriental original, with "CHINA" stamped all over it. It tapers from 17mm at the lugs down to 14mm at the buckle:



The buckle design, with the flattened part where the tang rests, is highly resistant to opening up - so the loss of the 14mm spring bar is most unlikely.


Nice chunky lugs maintain a sporty look. The flat mineral glass crystal is un-scratched (so far ;-) The crown doesn't look original to the watch though, it sticks out too far and is the wrong color. I have a good few of those same "LP" generic crowns in my bits box.

This is one of my dear Wife's favorite watches for casual wear. The sizeable dial and markings are most suitable for her eyesight as opposed to those lady's tiny vintage watches so commonly found on eBay.

Best regards,

xpatUSA

My ideal rotating Bezel

I prefer hours - good for other time zones, like eBay, or for living by solar time with one eye on the real world. But, on the other hand, I often need to time something in minutes. I also find that uni-directional bezels are a pain because I don't actually scuba-dive daily. And how do you set half-hours on a 60-clicker?

So, in my mind, I just bought this SandYathon:


The bezel would be narrower of course, but you get the idea. Mine would probably not have clicks but, if it did, it would have 120, not 60. Being a little old-fashioned, the hours would be subdivided into halves and fourths. The minute divisions would go all the way around as shown. Maybe the hour numerals would be Roman to readily distinguish them from the minutes. It could look quite good and nowhere near as cumbersome as the above creation.

For example, this Jupiter Pilot has two scales on a really narrow bezel and is still quite readable:

Best regards,

xpatUSA

Sexagesimal Time

Old measure wasn't much of a problem BC (before computers). We mixed together all kinds of units and bases but we were quite used to them. The Brits coped quite admirably with pounds, shillings, pence and even the occasional sovereign up until the early 70's when Heath took them kicking and screaming into the E.U., or EEC as it was known back then. To this day, Americans still struggle on bravely with tons, pounds, ounces and grains in everyday life - not to mention gallons, pints and fl. ounces!

Although most countries are metricated now, the time of day has remained supremely sexagesimal to this very day. The time of day is represented as hh:mm:ss. This format is based on the Babylonian positional numbering system, with colons separating the positions. The Babylonians inherited sexagesimal counting from the Sumerians and improved the system by adding positional significance (by powers of 60) and the concept of the number zero. They still used chicken-scratchin's (cuneiform) to represent the values of each position and each value was represented in base 10 notation using a grouping of the two symbols for one and ten. This symbol grouping was not itself positional and so simple addition gave the value, see table below. For example 23 is represented by 2 eyeballs and 3 wine-glasses, i.e. 2x10 + 3x1 = 23.



Because the number of hours in a day is less than 60 (on this planet, anyway) our time-of-day representation is truly sexagesimal and follows the Babylonian system with the addition of colons as separators and the use of Arabic numerals instead of cuneiform.

There is an interesting property of the hh:mm representation. It is either a fraction or an integer number depending on how you look at it, but the representation itself does not change. For example, let's say a timer shows a elapsed time of 3 hours and 40 minutes, which is written as "3:40". In our decimal system (i.e. positional base 10), that would be 3.667 hours or 220 minutes. In sexagesimal, 3:40 represents either 3x60^0+40x60^-1 hours or 3x60^1+40x60^0 minutes but the bolded numbers do not change and the colon remains where it's at.

But what if there were more than 59 hours involved, for example three days, 13 hours 43 minutes and 22 seconds? "Easy!", you say, "just write 85:43:22" - but sorry, that is not a true sexagesimal number because 85 is more than 59! To be truly "sexy", it would have to be written 1:25:43:22 which is 1x60^1+25x60^0+43x60^-1+22x60^-2 and which is also thoroughly confusing! Indeed, this is why we still have a DMS function (angular Degrees, Minutes and Seconds) on our engineering calculators due to the mixed bases of decimal degrees with sexagesimal minutes and seconds.

Best regards,

xpatUSA

Unusual Hamilton GG-W-113 bridge

I've serviced a good few Hamilton GG-W-113's over the past year and have become accustomed to various engraving styles used to designate their 17-jewel Cal. 649 ebauche ETA 2750. Some are even marked "seventeen 17 jewels unadjusted" with no mention at all of "H W Co Inc" & "649".

But, until today, I've never seen this style - the movement is from a one-piece case model dated May 1982:




The turned circle is about 2.4 mm dia, just under 1/10" !! The inked (?) lettering is not real sharp.

xpatUSA

What time is it (historically speaking)?

Let's say it's about half-way through the morning, our 10:00 hrs.

Well, we all know that AM is short for ante meridiem i.e. Latin for "before noon". But did you know that the Romans said it literally, i.e. "10 AM" meant ten hours before noon, i.e. our 02:00 hrs?

Not content with that confusion, their descendants decided to start the day at sunset - so half-way through the morning back then, their stupid clock would show somewhere between 15 o'clock and 16 o'clock!




This one, with its markers in the middle of the hour, would show exactly 15 o'clock.



And then there's "noon" which comes from medieval Church time, and was originally our 3 PM!
The Church started it's day at dawn, prime being the first hour, and said prayers every three hours more or less. However, the monks weren't allowed to eat before none the ninth hour, so they reduced the intervals between prayers until "nones" were said just after midday. Hence, our "noon" comes from the ninth hour of the Church day.

Best regards,

xpatUSA

UV-excited lume shots

Having recently purchased a 38-LED 2-Watt UV lamp, I decided to take some lume shots. UV light is best for charging photo-luminescent paint, see my article on watch lume. Here's the set-up:



When I switched on the lamp, the watch lume glowed like it was on fire!! However, the first shot was a little disappointing and there seemed to be no camera setting that brought out the brightness. It seemed that the UV itself was messing up the shot by over-exposing the camera sensor in spite of the UV filter on the lens:



So, I tried charging up the lume and then switching off the UV lamp before taking the shot. I ended up with 5 seconds exposure at f/22; consequently, much of that prized initial brightness was lost (f/22 is my standard aperture setting - I leave it there for a good depth field from the 60mm macro lens). Had I shot at say f/8 for a shorter time, the lume would have come out brighter. Still, even at f/22, the resulting pictures came out well and were combined in Photoshop without any processing other than cropping and re-sizing.

A re-lumed 1900's Trench watch:


A re-lumed Hamilton GG-W-113:


A Hamilton MIL-W-46374D with replacement Luminova hands:


In the last shot, the lumed seconds hand sweeps through the 5 secs exposure and the rapid fall in brightness of Luminova, even during that short time, is quite evident.

Best regards,

xpatUSA