Whither Mechanical Watches?

Sometimes a thing you are used to slowly vanishes right before your eyes. One such thing that I see is the wind-up manual mechanical wristwatch where you have to wind it every 2 or 3 days for the watch to keep functioning. It consisted of a spring mechanism which unwound slowly as time passed by driving the cogs and its intricate system of gears to move time. When you open the back of those watches, everything looked so delicate inside and you could see a swinging mechanism which controlled the system of gears that controlled the hands of the watch. I don't even see those type of manual watches these days, all being replaced by quartz movements and run using small batteries.

The beautiful aspect about the manual watches was that it seemed as if they had a heart. Keep the watch close to your ear and you could hear it tick-tocking away. The tick-tock would never stop until the spring unwound itself fully. If you were not getting sleep, keep one close to your ear and you will be lulled to sleep with those constant ticks. :-) No such pleasure on our digital or the quartz oscillator based watches. They are as silent as the moon. My first watch was my father's wind-up from HMT and it served a long time and used during exams as a faithful time-keeper.

The bigger cousin of the manual watch, the wind-up alarm clock is also on its way out. I see only quartz versions of the same these days. Those clocks had 2 keys for winding, one for the clock and one for the alarm. The Trriiiinnnnngggggg of those alarm clocks could wake up even a sleeping Kumbhakarna and you had to hit the push-button on its head for the alarm to stop or the alarm would ring until the alarm spring unwound itself fully. And the wonderful "tick-tock" heart-beat sound the clocks made which was audible clearly!!!. Some of the clocks had a small dial inside the main one for the seconds hand in addition to the alarm hand which used to rotate like a hamster on a treadmill. Those clocks could almost be used as a metronome if the house was a bit silent. I loved the ticking sound and the feedback when the keys were wound.

And the grand-daddy wall clocks which had a long pendulum swaying with their majestic tick-tocks and some of them having chimes at the hour and having a similar winding mechanism as the wind-up alarm clock. They were lovely with lots of woodwork, typically oak. Nowadays you find them only in antique shops and typically priced out of reach. :-(

Not to say that you don't get pure mechanical watches these days, but it has become almost elitist. Maybe Aishwarya Rai or Shah Rukh Khan can afford those Swiss made beauties which still have hand wound mechanisms, but for the rest of us, the generalia, the cheap quartz oscillators will keep time, having edged out the manual movements over the course of years.

I have a Casio ProTrek watch now with a bevy of features like altimeter, barometer, tide level, moon phase, a compass with all the other things expected of an electronic watch like a chronograph, multi-city time etc and with a solar based rechargeable battery system on the dial. Still I have a very special place in my heart for those old "tick-tocks with a heart" which were my first exposure to chasing time and have stood by me through thick and thin and for the memories.

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