Whoa pplater. You have been quiet for awhile, but you have obviously been gestating this post and it’s great to read the ‘egg’ now it has been laid. So many strands to this thread and already, as I read the responses, I see that purists are picking up on different aspects of your post. Great stuff and much appreciated by me.
To have such a ‘visceral’ pull on us I believe that mechanical watches provide links to our humanity that are deeply compelling. Since the industrial age we have used man-made mechanisms, such as clocks and engines, to help us understand the complexities of life and our place in the universe. [Has anyone equated horology with religion?] They obviously fall short, but give us an approximation and a framework for our understanding of ‘life’.
Watches evoke complex and strong emotions because they mark the passage of time. But it’s more than this. They remind us of the presence of time. They force us to think about our lives and our mortality. They encourage us to think about what we have left behind and what lies ahead.
As you know from my previous scratchings I am drawn to many of the mechanisms you show here. I collect model engines (now there’s a future post for TimeOut) and get along to the local ‘steam engine society’ and ‘Meccano Club’ annual shows to soak up the constructions. I am drawn to the same functional and ‘beautiful’ forms that are shown perfectly in some of the images you post (particularly the Klings and Fabrication De Montres Normandes prototypes).
But what is beauty? A watch may be beautiful in terms of black polishing and anglage that brings tears to your eyes (and you well know the attraction of this) but there is also beauty in a machine that might be roughly finished but logically executed. Some mechanisms, such as the La Tradition, have the movement laid out to show the flow of energy, but others, like the Lange Double Split, are difficult to comprehend in their complexity, but they are still compelling.
Very occasionally the mechanical design intersects with artistic beauty and with superlative finish (and don’t we appreciate man made finishes compared with the production-line items that surround us every day, no matter how well they may be finished by a laser guided robot accurate to the nano-meter level). But these watches are few and far between.
We need another post to consider which watches achieve this engineering + art + humanity juggling act. There are monstrously complicated watches out there that don’t really touch me emotionally, still others that are beautifully finished that don’t call my name, but occasionally a watch has the right balance of these attributes and I melt.
Classic stuff and thanks for trying to crystallize some complex ideas.
Andrew
Ps. I am currently undergoing a ‘sex change’ of sorts as I am moving from a lifetime of PC use to a Mac. The Apple techs have my PC for 48 hours and are doing something with my files (perhaps making them cool and interesting again?) to transfer them across to the iMac. I therefore do not have access to many images, but may be able to add more in a couple of days