A fine mechanical watch is an unreasonable object in the best sense — and the reasons to wear one have little to do with telling the time.
By any practical measure, the mechanical watch should have vanished half a century ago. A quartz movement keeps better time for a fraction of the cost. The telephone in one’s pocket displays the hour with a precision no spring could match. There is no rational need for a small machine of steel, brass and synthetic rubies, largely assembled and finished by hand, that must be wound and periodically taken apart.
And yet the mechanical watch has not merely survived. It is arguably more valued now than at any point in its history, and the reasons repay a moment’s thought.
A machine one can understand
A mechanical watch is powered by a coiled mainspring. As the spring unwinds it drives a train of wheels, and the release of that energy is metered by the escapement and a balance wheel swinging back and forth several times each second — the soft, rapid ticking one hears with the watch held to the ear. Every part of the system can, in principle, be seen, understood and repaired. Nothing is locked inside a chip.
For many owners this is the heart of it. In a world of sealed devices, the mechanical watch is a machine whose logic is visible, sometimes literally through a sapphire caseback, and whose working life a skilled watchmaker can extend more or less indefinitely. Turn it over under a lamp and the movement is all motion: the balance breathing, a jewel catching the light, bevelled edges polished for no eye but the owner’s.
“A watch is one of the few machines you can wear, understand and hand on.”
Complications
Watchmakers call any function beyond hours and minutes a complication: a date, a chronograph, a moon phase, a second time zone, a perpetual calendar that accounts for the uneven months and the leap year without correction. The most elaborate pieces combine many such functions in a case not much larger than a coin.
None of them is necessary. They are, however, a remarkable demonstration of craft, and the simpler ones can be genuinely useful. A second time zone serves the frequent traveller. A moon phase serves almost no one, and is loved for exactly that reason.
Made to be worn
The best watches are made to be worn. A watch kept permanently in a safe is a watch never enjoyed, and most watchmakers would rather their work gathered the small marks of a life. A scratch on the case from a doorframe, a strap shaped by years to one particular wrist — these belong to the object’s story rather than detracting from it.
Mechanical watches do need care. Makers generally recommend a service every several years, when the movement is dismantled, cleaned, lubricated, reassembled and regulated. It is a modest ritual of maintenance, and it is what allows a watch to run for generations rather than decades.
The heirloom
Few objects pass between generations as naturally. A watch is small, personal and durable, and it carries the memory of the wrist it sat on. Many people’s first fine watch is one they inherited; many others buy with the next owner already in mind.
This is perhaps the deepest reason the mechanical watch endures. It is designed to outlast the person who buys it, and so becomes one of the few everyday objects that connect people across time — a parent’s habit of winding it each morning, inherited along with the watch.
Experienced collectors give consistent advice. Buy what you will wear. Choose proportions that suit the wrist rather than the fashion of the season. Prefer legibility and quality of finish to novelty. And buy from a source able to document the watch’s history and support its servicing for years to come.
The rest is personal. A good watch should feel, after a few weeks, as though it had always been there — and, after a few decades, as though it always will be.
