A
mechanical wrist-watch is an everyday example of high quality engineering. A
typical mechanism has hundreds of tiny parts, many of which are much less than 1/2
millimetre in diameter. The final assembly of these parts into a working watch
mechanism requires a steady hand, fine tweezers and a ten-times magnifying
eye-piece or loupe.
The
energy required to drive a mechanical watch is stored in a spiral torsion
spring that is tensioned by winding. As the spring unwinds, it delivers energy
to the time-keeping mechanism and display (hour, minutes and second hands) via
a balance wheel and escapement. The escapement regulates the
release of power from the spring and the repetitive engagement and
dis-engagement of tiny components in the escapement produce the distinctive ticking
sound of the watch. The great English watchmaker George Daniels (1926-2011)
described the escapement as`… the ticking
heart of the watch, upon which its final performance depends'.
The
English watch and chronometer maker Thomas Mudge (1715-1794) invented the lever
escapement in 1754 or 1755, for use in portable clocks. By 1769 Mudge had
incorporated his innovation into a pocket watch, which was purchased the
following year by George III for his wife Queen Charlotte. This watch has a fine white enamel dial with
ornate, heat blued, hands. It remains in the Royal Collection at Windsor
Castle.
Mudge
was well aware of how important the lever escapement was, describing his
timepiece as, `… the most perfect watch
that can be worn in the pocket, that was ever made'. Mudge's confidence was
not misplaced; almost every one of the tens of millions of mechanical watches
that have ever been made since 1769 have used a variant of his lever
escapement. The biggest drawback that this type of escapement has is that it
needs to be lubricated to overcome the friction between its moving parts. Over
time the lubricating oil in the escapement degrades and thickens and the watch
mechanism loses accuracy.
In 1974 George Daniels invented the co-axial escapement to overcome
this shortcoming in the traditional lever escapement.
By the
late 1960's, tens of millions of mechanical watches with lever escapements were
being manufactured every year with a typical accuracy of about ± 20 seconds per
day. In 1969 the Japanese watch company Seiko introduced the Astron, the world's first production
quartz watch. Seiko was a long
established Japanese watch-maker, having been founded in Tokyo in 1881, with a
good reputation as a leading manufacturer of mechanical watches.
The Astron was the result of more than ten
years of significant research and development investment seeking to create a
high-accuracy battery operated watch. Seiko's quartz watch was revolutionary;
it had no main-spring, balance wheel or escapement. Instead, it used a
tuning-fork shaped crystal resonator that was driven by a battery and a circuit
as the means to keep time. When it was first introduced, the Astron cost as
much as a medium-sized car and was 100 times more accurate than a mechanical
watch. Within ten years cheap Japanese made quartz watches had transformed the
global watch market and almost destroyed the Swiss mechanical watch
industry.
This
volume was written by Henry Playtner (1865 - 1943), a Canadian watchmaker who
established and ran the Canadian
Horological Institute in Toronto between 1890 and 1913. Henry Playtner was
a hard taskmaster who set very high technical standards in his institute. Each
of Playtner's A-1 students had to create a masterpiece
watch from raw materials, except the dial, mainspring, hairspring and jewels,
in order to graduate from the institute.
Image: The
inverted T shaped lever at the centre of the mechanism rocks backwards and
forwards as the toothed escape-wheel
below it rotates clock-wise. From HERE.
References
Daniels,
G. (2012). All in Good Time: Reflections
of a Watchmaker. PW Publishers.
Fox, G.
(2012). Canada's Master Watchmaker Henry
R. Playtner and the Canadian Horological Institute. Privately published.
