My first watch was a Timex. It looked like this: It was crap, to be honest. If I remembered to wind it and set it in the morning when I got up, it would generally be no more than a minute or two wrong by the end of the day. A few years later, watching Tomorrow’s World on TV, I heard about a new technology: quartz crystal watches. In a quartz clock, electrical current is applied to a crystal of quartz.
I got a new watch. Again. I bought my last watch in 2001. There was nothing wrong with it. However, Casio brought out a new version that drops the moon phase and tide graph, and instead has 5-band radio atomic clock synchronization. As you can see, it’s not a major departure, visually speaking. The function of the buttons is slightly rearranged, the actual time is larger and easier to read, the time zones don’t have editable names, and the alarm now has a snooze function.
My watch is broken. Again. It’s a Seiko Kinetic. When it works, I love it. It never needs winding, never needs batteries, tells me the time and date and is accurate to within seconds a year. Unfortunately, this is the second time it has broken. It stopped at exactly 06:00 this morning. When I bought the watch, I hadn’t factored annual maintenance into the equation. I think I’m going to go back to cheap Casio watches, which will at least run for five years without failing.