Vintage Appreciation
Posted by: Anonymous
This essay was submitted to me by a long time Seiko collector who wished to remain anonymous. It’s a fun rambling read written by an admitted technology curmudgeon. In describing his love for mechanical watches, the author weaves his way through subjects as diverse as vintage cars, film cameras, Hewlett Packard calculators and 8-Track tapes.
We go through life adapting to new technologies that advance faster than we can master them. People listened to records for most of the 20th century, the majority of that time on the same standardized vinyl format. Cassettes and compact discs, let alone 8 track tapes, lasted a comparatively short time before being supplanted by the MP3 and Ipod formats. Men wore watches for decades, and carried them for even longer. However, it seems that we are seeing less and less watches worn these days, especially mechanical ones.
Not long ago we took pictures on film that needed to be developed and we actually dialed numbers on corded phones. When driving, we rolled down our windows without buttons and shifted gears manually. So much has changed in the last decade that things we had in common with our parents, grandparents and even great grand parents are now completely foreign to our children. We grew up without VCR’s and yet now they are obsolete along with other objects that have come and gone in a similar timeline. Is this the fate for the mechanical watch?
There are many things in life that, like a mechanical watch, function in a way that is meaningful and guttural to us. Things that just “are”. Things that we can understand and be in touch with. You feel, not just hear the click of a 35mm camera’s shutter and undestand that it lets light react with silver, leaving an image waiting to be developed on film. You can turn the distributor on a classic V8 engine and watch the timing advance with the strobismic effect of the timing light, and you can feel the click of the stem and the resistance of the mainspring when you set and wind your watch.
Do you feel anything similar when data is stored on your digital camera , when a handheld computer adjusts the fuel mixture ratios of an engine electronically via an OBDC connection or when the LCD panels of a digital watch blink on and off in the setting mode? I do not. I am not in touch with these at all. The zeroes and ones that exist in a microscopic world of digital storage do not resonate with me.
I began wearing a Seiko diver over 23 years ago.
I have progressed, adapted and utlized technology across many disciplines. Yes, I understand and appreciate many of the advances and conveniences of technology, but have we taken it too far?
I respect the design and capabilities of an HP 15C scientific RPN calculator and yet I wonder why most calculators today feel like a step backwards. Email has changed many things about our world, but I find texting on a cell phone to be inefficient and slow. Our keyboards have gotten so small that in some instances, they have become slower than the original mechanical typewriters they replaced in storing words and thoughts.
Some “advances” seem to have advanced us in the wrong direction. I watch my kids check their homework using the calculator in the Windows accessories folder. It is painfully slow to watch as they use the mouse to perform multiple tasks over and over again. The HP15C is faster, more efficient and more powerful. A 15C was just designed to be a calculator and it excels at that. But today, modern consumers expect an object to do more than just calculate, and with watches, they expect them to do more than just tell time.
Watches have to be “advanced” with multiple functions. They can’t just be, and do what they were designed to do. Is reaching down, getting out, opening or activating the screen of your cell phone/electronic device to see the time an advancement when comparing that action to the flick of a wrist for a glance at your watch?
The Seiko 600m professional diver was an “advance.”
It was then re-issued in quartz and went to a format that added the day to the time and date. It became more accurate with less need for setting. But, it then needed batteries.
Day, date, and time displays had already been available on Seikos for years.
Was quartz truly an advance? How much more accuracy did we obtain compared to some truly fine mechanical movements? Was the masterful work that went into the movements of the watches pictured above and below more advanced than that of a quartz watch. Yes, the quartz analog watch still retained a basic form and function that you could feel and understand, but was it as refined as the watch pictured below.
Which of the watches pictured below are more advanced?
If you consider miniaturization as technological advancement, where does this model stand?
Bear with me and indulge me as I take you through a day of vintage appreciation.
The day actually starts the night before. Bellmatic alarms don’t automatically engage every day, nor do they adjust for a.m. or p.m. You have to wind them and set them less than 12 hours in advance. However, you don’t have to worry about whether or not the volume is right like on your clock radio, or if it’s properly tuned to a station. When you have your Bellmatic set, you know it will go off. I awake the next morning hearing an alarm. The buzzing action of the Bellmatic creates a noise I can also feel.
Look at the trio below; which watch is the most advanced.
After a quick workout, I enjoy the hot water of a shower. I’m glad that sonic washers or disinfectant mist has not replaced my shower. I put on merino wool socks, denim jeans and a cotton t-shirt. I wear a leather belt and leather shoes. They are clothes that are just clothes. There is no advanced wicking polypropylene, no antibacterial agents bonded to the fibers and no breathable moisture barriers. I feel like a retro-curmudeion and select a hefty vintage stainless steel Seiko on a three buckled leather strap. It seems fitting for the drive I’m about to take.
Gathering my things, I head out to the car. Putting the Muncie transmission into neutral, I feel the clutch engage under my left foot through the Hurt shifter linkage. A bar has moved, rotating a switch on the steering column that engages the neutral safety allowing the car to start. I tap the gas, turn the key, and 400 cubic inches of Ram Air III engine fires up. I give enough gas to keep the RPM up over a thousand so the engine warms up. Yes, you have to warm this engine up on a cold day.
Every week or two, I check the oil, coolant and power steering fluid. When is the last time you had to check anything on your new car? Sure everything works, but being electronic, most don’t know how or why. Similarly, are you not closer to the watch you wind, set and adjust the date compared to the digital watch that you pick up without a second thought.
The car’s guages only stay lit if you turn the headlight knob just right to work the rheostat. When you back up, a physical engagement occurs and switches power to your backup lights. The car has “modern” amenities like a remote hood opening switch. You can feel the “thunk” of the solenoid as it activates the latch. Looking at the 6138 chronograph on my wirst, I watch the seconds pass. When I press the chronograph pusher, I feel something happen, and the seconds hand starts moving.
After a minute or two, the car has warmed up and will idle on its own. I hop out to put my bag in the trunk, hop back in and first buckle my lap belt and then the separate non-retracting shoulder belt hanging from the roof. Vintage things force you to interact with the world and think. With vintage, things don’t just happen.
I drive off with a feeling of sensory overload one doesn’t normally get from driving even a modern performance car. I know I’ve got an internal combustion engine just from the smells generated at start up. Although modern engines produce more horsepower per cubic inch of displacement, their low end torque is lacking. There’s no substitute for displacement, and that’s exactly what most modern engines lack. Horsepower creates speed, but torque creates the feeling of power. On a long straight stretch, I floor it feeling the oversized secondaries on the Quadrajet open up.
As I get down to a more reasonable speed, I look for mile markers. I use them along with my Seiko chronograph to check my speed. My speedometer is accurate. Keeping it accurate requires knowing your tire diameter, your rear axle gear ration, and then using the correct gear for yor speedometer cable. It does not just happen, you understand the relationship in a way a digital readout of average miles per hour cannot convey.
With my vintage car, if I get low on gas, it is up to me to notice the gauge. There are no warning sounds or voices warning me to fill up. The same goes for water temp and oil pressure. You develop a relationship with an older car and its subtleties. You can hop into a new car or pick up your G-Shock after it has been sitting still for weeks without missing a beat. You don’t get into a 1969 GTO or throw on an automatic watch that has been sitting idle for weeks without getting them ready first.
With a glance, you know the purpose of this vehicle. It has a stance; it occupies space purposefully. Like a stainless steel diver on your wrist, form follows function.
I pull into a gas station and decide to call the wife to see if she needs anything while I’m out. I purposely left my cell phone at home. It takes two more stops before I find a pay phone. Yet another thing, common to generations of us, that our kids can’t understand a need for. I go inside and pay cash for my gas. I also get change for the phone. Around me, people are pulling up with speed passes and credit cards. Many are talking on cell phones. Kids sit in the cars surfing the internet, playing games or texting/talking to friends using their own phones. I find it odd that they are talking to people on phones without talking to the other people actually in the car with them. Not surprisingly, most are not wearing watches.
I stop on the way home to take some pictures of the car. Getting out, I have to use my key to open the trunk, just as I have to do to lock my doors. There are no wireless beeping key fobs. I take my Pentax K-1000 camera out and shoot some pictures of the car. There is no instantaneous checking of your pictures, let alone a screen on the camera back. The pictures I take will need to be developed. I’m investing time and money into this. The camera, like a Seiko diver, has a heft and solidity to it that a digital camera or watch does not. How many digital cameras do you own that are either obsolete or use a card or connection that is no longer in production? The mechanical Pentax camera is still completely operable today. How long will it be until the types of batteries in your quartz analog or digital watch are no longer produced?
It starts to rain as I’m on the way home. It’s a good thing the back windows are up. One can’t reach the handles from the driver’s seat. I roll up my window after manually making an adjustment to my sideview mirror and then unbuckle my fixed shoulder belt so I can roll up the passenger side window. I need to close off the Ram Air hood scoops from the rain. I reach down and work the knob. Like the crown of a watch connects you to the movement, this knob connects me to the scoops. Instead of a stem, there’s a cable that slides within a metal sheath and pushes the flaps closed. I feel it working as I turn the knob.
The windshield starts to fog. I turn on the heat with the blowers set on high. Beneath the rumble of the engine, a small click goes off as the relay transfers power from the alternator to the blower bypassing the “low” setting resistor. The sound reminds me of the click of my Seiko 6138 pusher. Now there is too much hot air blowing on me so I pull the control to ”defrost”, physically turning a round object. It’s like turning the bezel on a diver watch. I feel the clunk of a flap move and the heat is now directed towards my windshield.
The rhythm of my wipers and the clunk of the flap remind me that I have not had any music on. My AM radio has push buttons. You turn the tuning dial to a station you like and pull the button out to set the preset. Then in the future, to find that station again, you push that button and the tuning dial will mechanically align itself to that station. The push pull action of the radio buttons is not unlike the setting of a Bellmatic alarm. The utter simplicity of this action escapes my children. They have mastered touch screens and can fly through multi step electronic user menus but this radio preset system baffles them. The simplicity is alien to them.
I turn on the headlights. The knob to do so pulls vacuum hoses into alignment and my hidden headlights rotate into operation like the inner bezel of a Seiko Navigator. Yet another example of mechanical systems actuating. What’s going on inside a digital device when you are changing its functions?
Are our watches hated for being old and ugly? Not all are battered. Some stunning examples that look brand new still exist. Others, like these Rally II wheels have seen better days.
Like a trip to our favorite watch restorer, some sandblasting and clean up work can rejuvenate them for decades more of service. Compared to the massive diameter rims of today with their low profile tires, looking at these wheels is similar to comparing a vintage shrouded diver to an ultra-thin quartz watch. Even if they look new, many of our older watches will appear unusual to many today.
Time for some music. I feel like listening to some CCR so I open a container the size of a shoebox and pull out an 8-Track. As I push the tape into the player, it activates. A capstan pulls the tape in an endless loop. Something about the endless loop makes me ponder Seiko’s Magic Lever winding system. As the tape nears the end of a program, the metal splice on it activates a solenoid and the tape heads shift to reading two other 1/16-inch portions on the tape. I prefer the next program right now so I push the program button and listen to the “ker-chunk” sound again as the heads shift to the next pair of 1/16-inch tracks.
Modern data storage devices, like every other tape storage device besides the 8 Track, are designed with a fixed tape head. It is a hallmark of their reliability. An 8 Track too, must have it’s head aligned properly to play the music, but they are not designed to be in a fixed position. The 8 Track tape head must have the ability to shift every time the splice activates the solenoid or the user pushes the “program” button. I can’t understate what a huge dichotomy this is. A tape playback device design such as an 8 Track with it’s shifting heads goes against much of what made tape reading so successful much like many modern watches that are designed to do so much more than just tell time.
Additional watch functions such as day, date, GMT, chronograph and rotating bezels seem reasonable. A complication or two or even three just requires more refinement of an existing movement. Other functions on a watch like heart rate monitors, calorie counters, USB storage, GPS, etc. seem as unreasonable as expecting an 8 Track to bring it’s heads out of alignment over and over on purpose, while staying in alignment while an endless loop feeds through at a constant speed. This seems as unfair as asking an automatic watch to always tell time with accuracy and reliability regardless of the activity, position or temperature the watch is exposed to. Sure there are digital watches that do all of the above functions yet they are so complicated to operate that they seem to lose sight of the fact that they exist to tell time.
I hope mechanical watches don’t go the way of 8 Tracks, whose virtues did not seem to outweigh its flaws. You do not put up with splices coming unglued, aging foam, broken belts, limited playtime, and bulky tapes for their sound quality. The 8 Track is an affectation; a dated and outmoded device used mainly for the satisfaction of proving that they still function. They are regarded as an object of ridicule by the masses.
Rather than 8 Tracks, lets hope mechanical watches continue on in a manner more akin to record albums. While it’s a dated format, attributes such as superior sound quality keep records in favor among knowledgeable and sophisticated audiophiles. Playing a record is a tangible experience; a needle reacting to ripples engraved in the vinyl. You can see it happening. It’s an experience that is lost in the bits, bytes and digital sampling of CD’s or MP3’s. just like something is lost when you glance at a cell phone to tell time versus looking at a piece of machinery on your wrist. Just as the masses are learning that there is some magic involved in vinyl playback, lets hope they realize that there is magic involved in mechanical timekeeping as well.
People complain about the accuracy of mechanical versus electronic. They complain about the prices and repair costs. Asking a small, precisely constructed mechanical object to compete against modern devices seems about as fair as expecting me to get the same gas mileage from my GTO as a Prius, or expecting an 8 Track to have rewind and fast forward functions. Let’s hope that many continue to remember that there is something magical about mechanical watches so they too don’t become like the 8 Track; ridiculed, dated and outmoded affectations.