Nolan Craft

Watches, craft, history, and culture.

    Movements

    A watch movement is the engine. It’s the thing inside the case that actually keeps time and makes the hands move, and in the trade they call it the calibre, which is a fancy word I learned from someone else and now say with confidence at parties.

    Here’s the thing about movements. Almost everything you will ever read about them comes down to one question, mechanical or quartz. A mechanical movement runs on a wound mainspring. You wind it, or your wrist winds it, and the energy gets let out in tiny careful sips by something called an escapement, while a little balance wheel swings back and forth to keep it honest. No battery. Just stored energy and some very clever geometry from people much smarter than me.

    A quartz movement, on the other hand, is a battery and a little quartz crystal vibrating 32,768 times a second, which is a number I memorized and repeat the way some people quote scripture. Every vibration gets counted, the hands step forward, done. One is a tiny machine. The other is a tiny circuit that happens to tell time.

    Mechanical splits into two camps. Manual wind, where you wind the thing yourself, usually every morning while your coffee brews. And automatic, where a little rotor swings around with the motion of your wrist and does the winding for you, which feels like getting away with something.

    Quartz has its own whole family tree. There is high accuracy quartz, which corrects for temperature and can hold a few seconds a year, a level of precision that makes my mechanical watches look like sundials. There is solar, which drinks light so you never change a battery. And there is kinetic, which is Seiko’s wonderfully weird idea of putting a rotor in a quartz watch, like an automatic that changed its mind halfway through.

    Then there are the ones that refuse to pick a side. Spring Drive is Seiko’s decades long science project. Mainspring for power, an electromagnetic regulator instead of an escapement, and a seconds hand that glides around the dial instead of ticking. It is genuinely strange and I love it. Electro-mechanical and hybrid movements are the earlier experiments, battery powered balance wheels and tuning forks, the stuff that came before quartz won. Smart and connected movements are the current awkward truce between real watchmaking and electronics. And underneath all of it are the historical types, verge and cylinder and lever escapements, the dead ends and the foundations. Everything had to start somewhere, usually somewhere weird.

    There is also the business side of movements, which is where it gets interesting if you care about why things cost what they cost. A pretty small number of manufacturers make most of the movements in the world. They build them in families of related designs. And watch nerds memorize individual calibers the way car guys memorize engine codes, which tells you everything you need to know about watch nerds, myself included.

    If you want to understand a watch, start here. The movement is usually where the answers are hiding.

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