Watch Buyer's Guide
The Basics of Time
One of the most often asked questions in our store is, "does a watch that costs thousands of dollars tell time better than a cheap, drug store, throw away watch?" The answer is of course no. A $10 quartz movement will keep near perfect time...at least for a few months. Accuracy alone has little effect on the value or desirability of a watch. The truth is, those of us who love fine timepieces don't share this passion because we like watching the minutes tick by. We love fine watches because we know the time, effort, skill and artistry that goes into the design and production of each masterpiece. Fine watches are so special precisely because they are usually built around older mechanical technology, the basics of which has been around literally for centuries. It’s time tested engineering, modernized and improved, that simply works...usually for decades, without the need of a battery.
To this day, the basic mechanical wrist watch is still acknowledged as one of mankind's greatest inventions. In fact, the more mechanical the movement, the more hand built parts it contains, the more it is actually worth. Value is a function of materials, labor, mechanical complication and rarity. Now lets get into the basic differences between timepieces.
Quartz Technology
Basic quartz technology is, believe it or not, an American invention. In the early 1970's, the Hamilton Watch Company in Lancaster, PA developed both LCD and Quartz time keeping technology. Quartz technology is remarkably simple. By passing a constant electric current through a quartz crystal, it vibrates at a constant frequency. The oscillating quartz crystal then drives the step motor to move the watch's hands at a constant rate. The battery, quartz crystal and step motor replaced the mainspring and gears of the venerable mechanical movement. ronically, Hamilton chose to produce LCD watches and sold basic analog quartz technology to a little company called Seiko in Japan. Ten years later, Seiko was the largest watch company in the world. Today, however, the finest watches, mechanical and quartz, are built back where almost all early watch technology was born and perfected...in Switzerland.