Mechanical watches

Watch Repair Up Close. (Morning Edition - 5/20/02 - 6:27) -- "In the small town of Lititz, in southeastern Pennsylvania, architect Michael Graves designed a $9 million educational facility with the facade of an Amish barn. Inside the building, students pair a simple tradition with some measure of extravagance, as they practice watch repair, a craft that arrived in this Pennsylvania town with the Swiss and German immigrants of the 19th century."

Detailed analysis of a Seiko automatic. More on automatic watches @ Wikipedia. Here is a link to a page at the Breguet web site, briefly describing how they give a perpetual calendar function to a mechanical wristwatch--tiny springs and wheels that keeps track of whole years, even leap years. And here is a link to a web site of used ("vintage") Breguet watches for sale. Here is an article explaining how a perpetual calendar mechanism works in an IWC watch, a Breguet rival.

Musings

• Here's a conundrum: As a rule, mechanical watches (wind-up or automatic) cost most than those with a quartz (battery-driven) movement, sometimes considerably more. Why then would anyone buy a mechanical watch?
  
  
• When else do some people prefer older, often less efficient technologies, even if they cost more? Here's one suggestion--consider the extent that mechanical watches today are a little like horses: a fabulous, but out-dated technology on which people spend vast sums of money for little practical reasons.