Call me old fashioned, but I have always preferred mechanical watches to the new fangled electronic or digital watches. Maybe my fascination for mechanical watches started when my father gifted me one simple (yet in my eyes, exceptional) mechanical watch when I turned ten years old. Decades have passed me by and I’ve bought myself scores of other watches. But this first mechanical watch, like all the other firsts in my life, holds a special place in my heart.
What is it about mechanical watches that catches my fancy? Well, like I said, it is a tad difficult to explain, but there is something so novel about the need for man to keep time, to segment the span of a day into measurable units and to keep track of them that resulted in the first mechanical watches. To be frank, the first such watches made use of either water or daylight to keep track of the time. But then, even in their heydays, they were the epitome of mechanical watches.
Although nobody knows for sure who the first inventor of the mechanical watches as we know them today really was, one thing is for certain. The world today is divided in two camps of people – those who constantly bless the creator of mechanical watches and those of us who continually curse him/her. For the unforgiving minute as Kipling stated, is truly that. And mechanical watches often remind us of our own fallibility.
Anyways, to get back to the point, I have always preferred mechanical watches to digital ones as I continue to be amazed how a simple thing like a spring can keep the watch in perpetual motion. Seriously. If you ever have an opportunity to peer into the innards of mechanical watches, you will begin to grasp the full meaning of what I am trying to tell you. All those small gears and cogs, and just one wound up spring to keep them ticking gloriously for days, if not months. This is what amazes me about mechanical watches. And although a large number of today’s digital or quartz watches try and mimic the appearance of mechanical watches, the true connoisseur knows and appreciates the difference. The digital watch is a soul less entity. The mechanical watches have withstood the test of time to emerge victorious. This is probably why the most discerning collectors don’t collect anything other than mechanical watches. And they probably never will even in the days to come.
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