The Owners Guide to Wristwatches

Complicated Watches

This is not about the complications of owning a wristwatch but about the complications that are built into them! These are legion.

The commonest is a calendar, which may have just the day number of the month from 1 to 31 so that for months of less than 31 days you have to alter the figure by hand. For the older calendar watches this could be tedious: pull out the button and turn the hands forward through 24 hours for each day to be caught up. More modern mechanical watches are constructed so that the button pulls out to a second click enabling the date to be set directly and independently of the hands. Some watches have a small olive-like pusher which is pushed in while the button is out in the first click to achieve the same result. Others have setting buttons around the edge of the watch. To change the date on digital watches, I can only suggest that you read the instructions as there is little standardisation in the methods used.

More complicated calendars give day of week, day number, and month, and may be perpetual calendars that take account of the varying number of days in the months and are also able to allow for leap years.

Another complication is the addition of a dial showing moon phase (useful for planning night journeys when there are no lights?)

Then there are the multi-dial watches, usually chronographs (a stop-watch facility) which come in many forms to measure everything from pulse rate to miles/kilometers per hour. A sought after complication is the up & down dial which is a small subsidiary dial showing the proportion to which the mainspring is wound.

There are alarm watches, navigators watches, direction-finding watches, and at the really expensive end of the market, repeater watches that will sound the hour and the quarters when required.

And finally, there are watches that include many of these complications in the one movement.