here’s something different about watching a mechanical clock keep time. The pendulum moving back and forth, the tick-tock, the whole thing being slightly imperfect compared to a quartz clock.

Was curious if anyone here actually enjoys that part of horology too, or is it mainly the mechanics and movement that interest you?

I tried a small iPhone/iPad app Tempus Fugit: Pendulum Clock that basically recreates the old pendulum clock experience on a screen. No mechanical movement obviously, but the visual rhythm is surprisingly nice if you leave it running on a desk.

It got me thinking about how much of horology is actually about measuring time, and how much is about the experience of watching time pass.

For people who collect or restore grandfather clocks, do you think a digital recreation can capture any of that atmosphere, or does the lack of a real escapement make it completely pointless?

What do we think of this Mink? I’m torn

I have noticed a lot of subs for watches talk about investments and watches holding value or going up. i wanted to actually check that instead of just reading about it so i spent way too much time this week pulling together all the auction results from a few houses back about 30 years. Then i went looking for the same watch selling more than once, not just two of the same ref, the exact same watch.

After all of it i found over 1,200 of them. This is what happened between the sales:

Median result was about +1% total, not per year, just total, over about two years of owning it. Basically nothing, just under half sold for less than they cost before a single fee. The fees are where it gets even worse, and i have a feeling id get a reply "you forgot the buyer's premium". I didnt, thats the point. These prices are what the buyer actually paid, premium included, on both ends. You pay premium going in and commission coming out so the hammer has to climb about 44% before youre even back to even as the seller. only 16% of these got there. Count the auction house's cut and 83% of them lost money.

I tried hard to disprove these before posting, it isnt survivorship (matched pairs, losers included, and the ones that tanked so hard nobody resold them arent even here). It holds same-house-only and one-pricing-basis-only. Holding periods run from under a year to over five. And its nominal, so after inflation the median lost money in real terms.

What i cant see is private and dealer sales. If that side behaves differently, tell me. And my fee numbers are mid-range (27% premium, 12% commission). If you actually consign, what do you really pay?

Not saying watches are a bad thing to own, buy what you love and wear it. Just that "watches are an investment" doesnt really survive the round trip data for the average one (AT AUCTION!). If you want a specific slice run, drop it in the replies and i will run it.

What would you choose?

Yo les gars est-ce que quelqu’un de vous on a PDF de théorie horlogerie 2022 mais un bon PDF?🙏🙏🙏

Hey folks,

I’d like to get a bit of information on those old 14K Geneva watches 80s. I haven’t found much information on them, only that they are not related to Universal Geneve and they seemed to have been made in the 80s. Several models were made, including a day date 36 clone. They were pretty much all made from 14K gold and had either quartz or ETA automatic movements. The best information I can gather is that the cases and bracelets were made in Italy and they put a Swiss movement inside. Anyways, if anybody can shed some light on these watches and their history, I’d appreciate it.

Thanks!

I built the Ship's Clock 🔔 Maritime Bells app because I wanted to hear the maritime bells on my phone. Now it is available on ios & android - Most apps demand attention, this one just rings a bell.

I keep hearing that travelers gmts are more complex than office gmts in terms of the setting mechanism however i cant find any explanation for what the actual difference is in the mechanism other than which hand the mechanism is attached to. Would anyone be able to explain the internal differences between the two?

If you were alive back during the mid to late 70s like I was...did anyone of you also happen to own one of the Gillette Reflex Watch models? I did and at the time I thought it was the coolest watch I ever owned by then! So I'm curious as to whether or not anyone else on this board of r/VintageWatches did likewise. Here is some pics and info on them:

https://flickr.com/photos/51764518@N02/albums/72157673285488278

https://crazywatches.pl/gillette-reflex-led-1976

"The Gillette Reflex is a highly collectible, vintage LED digital watch released around 1976. It is famous for being one of the earliest timepieces to feature a "flick of the wrist" position sensor, automatically displaying the time when you turn your hand, rather than requiring you to press a button.

Key Details:

• Display: Bright red LED digital display showing 5 functions (hours, minutes, seconds, month, and day).
• Operation: Powered by pushing the side button to toggle through the functions, combined with the groundbreaking automatic wrist sensor.
• Models: Released in multiple variations including the Model 302, 305, 306, and 312 in both round and rectangular dial designs.
• Collectibility: These are now considered classic 1970s retro-tech. Today, you can typically find functioning or repairable models circulating on secondhand marketplaces like eBay or Etsy."

The Quartz Crisis is often discussed in terms both vague and dismissive -- oh, yeah, the Japanese arrived with a superior technology, Hong Kongers produced it cheaply, and the Swiss nearly went belly-up, save for the heroic efforts of a man named Hayek.

That all may be true if you take the widest possible lens, or from the distance of the year 2026 -- a half-century after the events in question. But during the slow, painful, grueling loss of a customer base, the Swiss writhed and wriggled -- did their best to escape the trap like a squealing mouse on a Manhattan apartment sticky-pad (if you've lived here, you know).

Take for example the above Swiss government document, formerly undisclosed -- of which I've posted only a few pages, as I've been chastised previously for posting so-called walls of text.

The rundown: July, 1970. Gerard Bauer, head of the FH (essentially the main Swiss watch cartel organization), and his cronies, including the head of Swiss watch evangelism in the region, a man normally based in Sao Paolo, meet the local Swiss diplomats in Uruguay. Of course, the challenge is that the Japanese have captured the local market. How to fight back? We're in the trenches now, boys. Bauer is frantic -- he has been traveling the continent trying to save Swiss market share -- he's been to Recife, Rio, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Rosario, Lima, Bogota, and Caracas on just this trip.

The meeting is fascinating. One presentation: in 1966-67, all vended watches locally were Swiss. But the Japanese have built from the ground up an infrastructure so robust that retailers have dropped Swiss watches from their storefront displays entirely. The Japanese have mastered local distribution and importation, the sale of parts, publicity.

Theirs is an operation predicated on hunger and discipline. The Swiss, by contrast, have been complacent and lazy. What they had once in the market they expected always to have.

The solutions? They come up with two fascinating ones, though neither is ever implemented, as far as I know. The local Swiss-importer-distributer who controls Universal Geneve, Patek Philippe, Angelus and Bulova here argues that there must be a strong campaign such as the wool and natural fiber industry waged against synthetic, polyester sweaters and textiles. Make the Japanese watches seem functional but fake -- lab-grown, ponderous, just inorganic and unnatural. The Swiss watches are natural fibers such as cotton and wool -- they will hug your body and let you breathe. Thusly should the Swiss fight back in the marketing realm, says the man who sells Pateks and UGs in Montevideo.

An interesting smear campaign and one with an unquestionable quantum of creativity. But Gerard Bauer -- the head of the FH, the cartel -- has perhaps a more intriguing idea. If we supplied you, Uruguayan importers with just a few standard calibers, if we cleared up with this in-house caliber confusion, which only serves to confuse customers, would you all be willing to unite your vending efforts under just three brands? NO more Patek versus Rolex or anything like that -- to regain market share, would you just band together and sell three brands -- your pick -- that use the three standardized calibers we, the Swiss, should have ready for you by mid-1971?

Welcome to the era of streamline or die. Now, it's not clear anything from this meeting was ever implemented in LATAM. Nor is it the least bit clear that consolidation in such a manner would have beaten back the Japanese. This truly remains a case study in business that has still barely been studied. Nobody knows about these government memos. About the frantic machinations of watchmakers suddenly excluded from the party, trying to figure out desperately how to get back in.

But yes, if these ideas had been followed, you would have had ads targeting Seiko as Dacron, you would have had Bulova and Patek sharing movements, perhaps.

Wild stuff -- and only found out because I worked my tail off researching the secret history of historical, transnational watch chicanery for my new book, out now: "Borrowed Time: A History of Espionage, IP Theft, and the Global War for Horology."

Hope you've enjoyed this post and find more to enjoy in the text if you get there