I quickly learned to make winding a daily ritual upon waking up: twist the crown, hear it rachet, feel the mainspring tighten until you can’t turn the crown anymore. When I first got my hand-winding watch, I’ll admit that I initially often forgot to wind it, only to find my watch hours behind the actual time when I looked down to check it. Sure, that tactile experience may come at the cost of convenience, but it’s worth it. But physically having to wind a watch adds another tactile dimension to the experience. Find a watch, buy a watch, affix watch to the wrist, then look at it. No matter how you want to justify watch collecting as a hobby, there’s no getting around how fundamentally passive it is. It may seem trivial, but for so many enthusiasts the appeal of having a high-end watch is experiencing the machinery underneath.Ī hand-winding watch is one of the few instances in which the wearer can truly engage with their timepeice. Take it away, though, and you have full access to the bridges, screws, gears and other machinery. The other big downside to an automatic rotor is that it will always obscure about half of the movement if it’s visible through a transparent case back. Hand-winding also leads to prettier movements. It’s for this reason that most ultra-thin watches favor hand-winding. This, in turn, adds to the height of the movement, thus making the overall watch fatter. Automatic watches are almost always thicker than hand-winders because they need an oscillating rotor affixed to the bottom of the movement to wind up the mainspring. There are a couple of advantages that hand-winders have over their automatic counterparts. I reckon that if you were to ask a watch executive or designer why this is, they’d tell you nobody actually wants to have to wind their watch every day. Aside from those, most mechanical watches these days come packing automatic winding. There are a few instances where this isn’t true - many niche-within-a-niche watch types have them examples include the classicly-styled field watches such as the Weiss or ultra-thin dress watches, like Christopher Ward’s C5 595. It’s a shame, then, that there’s a dearth of hand-winding watches on the market. Secondly, now that I own a hand-winding watch that I wear on a daily basis, I feel the same way. One, this was probably the only time I witnessed somebody really getting the whole mechanical watch thing for the first time. Really makes it apparent it’s mechanical.” Usually “that’s an ugly watch.” It was to my surprise, then, that once he had returned the Weiss to me, he said something along the lines of this: “I like that you have to wind it to get it going. He, for all intents and purposes, wasn’t a watch guy, whose opinions on timepieces were mostly concerned with aesthetics. Finally, the Fortis Official Cosmonauts Chronograph, worn by Russian cosmonauts in space, proved without doubt that normal everyday body movements were sufficient to supply the required energy.About a year ago, I coordinated a watch loan - specifically a Weiss mechanical field watch - for a photo shoot a colleague was working on. The first watch in space, the Omega Speedmaster Professional ( “Moon Watch”), still featured manual winding. This solution could not win through.īefore self-winding watches were worn in space, there was a short discussion whether or not due to lack of gravity there would be enough kinetic energy for the mechanism to function. One more version of the automatic winding was the "Pump-Action" automatic by Wyler. Over the next 40 years, nearly every watch manufacturer introduced their own automatic winding mechanism, and this is the dominant system today.Īlbert Pellaton developed another system of automatic winding, which applied for a patent in 1946 and was completed in 1950 the Pellaton winding. The automatic wristwatch concept came to the mass market when Rolex presented its “ perpetual” winding in 1931, which made manual winding entirely unnecessary. Wristwatches make automatic winding more useful because arm movements deliver the required amount of kinetic energy, unlike comparably static pocket watches. In the 1920's, when the wristwatch was preparing for its triumph, the Englishman John Harwood applied this automatic winding concept to wristwatches. Abraham-Louis Perrelet is considered the inventor of the automatic winding at pocket watches.
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