Personal Tech

My Bionic Extension

I was not expecting this when I bought it

The first watch I ever had was a Mickey Mouse watch my grandmother bought me on a trip from San Francisco to Houston via train. It was Union Pacific back then and we waited in the hall while a Black porter converted the cabin from sitting to sleeping.

She bought me the watch because I kept asking what time it was. She found out afterward I did not know how to tell time yet. The next year I had lessons and still remember penciling in the hands onto clock faces printed on paper that was more wood than paper. The pulpy tan sheet was so soft that writing in pencil was a balance between no mark and a tear. We may have as well used pen since erasing simply created lint balls.

By the ’70s the digital watch was all the craze. Red LED numbers that you could only read in the dark by pressing a button. Grandpa still wore a gold wristwatch with thin hands and simple indices while the ladies wore delicate bracelets with faces so small as to be unusable.

Through most of the ’80s and ’90s, I wore whatever quartz watch was easy to read, usually a plastic case Timex. By the turn of the millennia, I discovered Soviet-made Poljot watches. These were manually wound and had an alarm feature that would make the watch buzz by spinning a small rotor.

The alarm invariably would go off at inopportune moments, the most comical being a town hall meeting with Bob Eiger at Disney. He paused and asked if someone was shaving in the back of the theater. I tried to look innocent doing the “who farted look around act”.

It was not until 2004 I bought a Swatch Irony Aluminum watch while on a trip to San Francisco. This was my first Swiss watch and to this day it is still my favorite.

This started me thinking I should be particular about the watch I wear as it is a touchstone and a source of comfort. I abhor showy watches that scream “look at what a wannabe asshole I am”. The worst are oversized aviator watches worn by guys taking Southwest Airlines, though diver watches run a close second. Real divers use a dive calculator, not a watch.

The Mondain railway watch was my next special timepiece. Again, Swiss in construction and a face copied from European station clocks. Inside, the movement is surrounded by a plastic buffer making it look cheap even though the timekeeping is impeccable.

Last summer I brought two watches with me on a trip to the Bay Area and after arriving found both had dead batteries. Upon return I refreshed the batteries in all my watches with varying success, normally I would have a watch shop swap the battery but with Covid lurking, I turned to DIY. One had a case I could not open, another I broke the crystal while attempting to put the back on. After all that work, I had no place to dispose of the little toxic discs.

This prompted me to purchase a Seiko 5 automatic. The winding is done by a weighted rotor that winds the mainspring as you move your arm about. A clever but simple concept. The Japanese movement is well rated and much more affordable than Swiss movements of the same design.

What I did not expect was the bionic nature of the timepiece. It cannot be wound by hand, you must wear it or move it around to wind it up. This prompted me to wear it daily to keep it wound up. Whereas winding a watch manually feels like you are manipulating a small machine, having a watch wind up based on the kinetic energy produced by your living body makes the machine a part of your body. It feels like the watch is alive since it is powered by being in close contact with your body. You eat food, burn calories, move about, read the time.

It is both eerie and comforting.