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Thread: Five Things

  1. #451
    Quote Originally Posted by mlcor View Post
    A particularly fascinating five. The thing about Timex still using more brass than steel—how? Certainly not cases, so must mean more inside?


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    Most modern Timex cases are still plated brass.

  2. #452
    Quote Originally Posted by Dimman View Post
    Most modern Timex cases are still plated brass.
    Wow. I did not know that.


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  3. #453
    Super Member Raza's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by mlcor View Post
    Wow. I did not know that.


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    Yup, my Weekender is a brass case.
    Read my latest IWL blog entry! An Ode To Rule Breaking

  4. #454
    but not quite so many know that an Enicar was the third watch to be worn on a successful summit of Everest (or the second, depending on what you believe about the first two).
    I shouldn't have to concede this, but you really do learn something new every day. It's doubly ironic given that I have a soft spot for Enicar.

    *Edit* and, on the second attempt and 24 hours later, the penny drops - The Sherpa! As my wife keeps telling me, 'for someone who is so clever you are remarkably daft'.

    And, an obsessive four hours later, I now know that, once again there were two sponsors who gave watches - Enicar and GP, that the watch that Enicar advertised as being the watch on the mountain wasn't because:

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    'Turtle' lugs. I don't blame them for changing the watch!
    Last edited by Matt; Dec 15, 2018 at 10:19 PM.

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  6. #455
    Moderator - Central tribe125's Avatar
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    • Watch designer Emmanuel Gueit was thrown out of art school because they said he had no talent for design. So he got a job at Audemars Piguet and designed the Royal Oak Offshore.

    • The first watch with an open-worked or skeleton movement was made by André-Charles Caron in around 1760. As curious members of the Age of Enlightenment, the public flocked to view what Caron called the ‘innermost secrets’ of the watch. There is also a fanciful (and somewhat incoherent) story about a Napoleonic soldier modifying his watch during the Battle of Austerlitz, but Austerlitz was forty-five years later. André-Charles Caron was the father of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, better known as Pierre Beaumarchais, one of the most extraordinary and multi-talented figures of his time.

    • Omega made a watch modelled on the German V-2 rocket bomb that brought terror to London in the latter stages of World War II. It was all a bit of fun though, because it was actually modelled on the rocket-ship of Tintin, the Belgian cartoon character, and it was his rocket that was based on the V-2. The watch featured a rocket-ship at 11 o’clock and a red and white chequerboard pattern for the minutes track. Negotiations with the heirs of Tintin’s creator broke down and Omega was left with a stock of redundant dials. Undeterred, and dispensing with the little rocket-ship, and... hey presto! - the Omega Speedmaster Professional Racing. They didn’t sell, or not without a large discount. Omega has some Tintin prototypes but can’t show them because of copyright issues. Tintin now makes his own moon rocket watches.

    • Breguet sent his son to be apprenticed with John Arnold and John Arnold sent his son to be apprenticed with Breguet. Breguet’s son found the people of England too coarse and too drunken, so elected to go back to Paris. In particular, Antoine-Louis Breguet found it hard to tolerate the people of Birmingham.

    • If silicon and glass are more or less the same thing, which they are, then silicon hairsprings have been around since the early nineteenth century. The British Museum has an example of a balance system made from glass in 1822. There is even a patent for a glass spring, filed by Robert Hook, going all the way back to 1660. Edward John Dent and John Roger Arnold (son of the famous John Arnold) were the pioneers of practical production in the 1830s. Dent and Arnold made a chronometer with a glass balance spring that was tested by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Fears about fragility were allayed when it survived being knocked off a table. More systematic tests included placing it as close as possible to a firing battery of 24-pounder guns. Unfortunately, the chronometer showed timing variations of up to fifteen seconds a day. Nobody knew why, but for all of its advantages (no magnetism, no corrosion and low density) the constant fluidity of glass may not have been fully understood. Glass is never truly solid.

  7. #456
    The Emmanuel Gueit story sounds a bit ironic for me but seeing the ROO,I can sort of understand the teacher's POV

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  9. #457
    El bot. geoffbot's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by synequano View Post
    The Emmanuel Gueit story sounds a bit ironic for me but seeing the ROO,I can sort of understand the teacher's POV
    My thoughts exactly!
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  11. #458
    Quote Originally Posted by geoffbot View Post
    My thoughts exactly!
    Ditto, you guys beat me to it...


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  13. #459
    +1 on the Art School judgement.

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  15. #460
    Moderator - Central tribe125's Avatar
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    • Omega made watches from 904L steel before Rolex. Not that many, but some. The model in question was the Ploprof Mark 1 of 1971, and the use of ‘Nautilus’ steel was suggested by COMEX, who knew of its merits in the construction of diving bells. Professional divers were happy with the Ploprof, but the general public couldn’t be persuaded to wear one on land. Specialist and low-volume production meant that you could buy two Submariners for the price of a Ploprof.

    • Kikuo Ibe, inventor of the G-Shock, owns three watches, all versions of the original G-Shock. He wears a black one in spring and autumn, a red one in winter and a white one in summer.

    • F. P. Journe isn’t crazy about the big brands, but says the Rolex escapement is ‘very intelligent’. He also likes the Tissot automatic chronograph movement.

    • Seiko was beating the Swiss before quartz came along. According to one report (quite possibly emanating from Japan) the number of Seiko 5s exported in 1966 exceeded the total number of self-winding watches produced in all of Switzerland.

    • It takes one second to make a Citizen quartz movement. The Lida factory has more than ten production lines producing quartz movements at this rate. Human input is limited to setup and maintenance.

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