Five Things

[tribe125]

Is that the depth rating

Reading comprehension test: 0/10

[geoffbot]

Yes, I think so. Still looks a bit Tankish, doesn’t it?

Less so at an angle, perhaps -


Attachment 91749

Deffo does, but no chiseled corners?

[Seriously]

Reading comprehension test: 0/10

Oh yeah , I’m Looking on a smaller screen , so didn’t see the ‘bigger picture’

[rodia77]

Meaty bits today, thanks Alan for continuing this thread!

[tribe125]

• Truman Capote had a low tolerance for bad taste in wristwatches. Interrupting an interviewer in 1972, he said, “Take that ugly watch off your wrist and put this one on.” He removed a Cartier Tank from his own wrist, and threw it across the desk. “I beg you keep it - I have at least seven at home.”
  
  
• Reading the time doesn’t come naturally, because it involves using one scale for two separate measurements. It’s not immediately obvious to children, and it wasn’t obvious to early eighteenth-century adults. Early clocks and watches weren’t accurate enough for minutes, but it wasn’t clear how minutes would be shown, once they became viable. As an aid to reading a two-hand dial, hours were shown in Roman numerals, with an inner scale of Arabic numerals for minutes. It took about a century to move from five-minute numerals to fifteen-minute numerals, and then to no minute numerals at all. Only in the twentieth century were we able to cope with a complete absence of both hour and minute markers, and not everyone is entirely comfortable with that.
  
  
• Inaccuracy was once taken for granted. In 1711, Alexander Pope said: “‘Tis with our judgements as our watches, none go just alike, yet each believes their own.”
  
  
• Have you heard the one about longitude and the yelp of a wounded dog? Sir Kenelm Digby was a diplomat and natural philosopher with some odd ideas. One of them concerned ‘powder of sympathy’, an occult remedy that he had learned from a Carmelite monk. Essentially, wounds could be healed at a distance by applying the powder to the weapon that had made the wound, or a bandage that had been used to dress it. Digby claimed to have healed wounds by this method, and the only disadvantage was that the patient would experience brief pain, and would react with a start when the powder was applied, even though they were in a different location. As we know, a large prize was offered to anyone who could make a chronometer accurate enough to allow the determination of longitude at sea. John Harrison made such a chronometer in 1759. Before that, in 1687, a pamphlet proposed a different solution. A ship could carry a wounded dog. Back in England, and on the stroke of midday, a bandage that had previously been applied to the dog’s wound could be dipped in Digby’s powder. The dog would yelp, and the ship’s captain could work out where he was. There were a number of problems, not least that the dog might get better in the course of a long sea voyage. Sadly (or commendably), the anonymous pamphlet is likely to have been a satire.
  
  
• A mechanical watch may be the most efficient machine in the world. The energy liberated by a cubic centimetre of petrol will keep a watch running for 585 years. The same watch, if well-maintained, should still keep time within ten or fifteen seconds a day at the end of this long period. The man who worked this out was François Le Lionnais, a French engineer and mathematician. Le Lionnais was a man of many talents, a friend of artist Marcel Duchamp, and the co-founder of a modernist literary movement. A member of the French Resistance during World War II, he was sent to a concentration camp, where he was given the surprising task of assembling V-2 rocket bombs - which he duly sabotaged. In 1959 he wrote ‘Le Temps’, source of the petrol calculation.

[geoffbot]

Some good stuff there Alan, bookended by 2 really good stuffs

[OhDark30]

Another great selection, Alan!

The dog and longitude story reminds me of the Cat and Duck method of instrument flying:
https://www.avcom.co.za/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=63

[Pip]

Another great selection Alan! I need to interview whoever is the modern Truman Capote.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[tribe125]

• Abraham-Louis Breguet didn’t make most of his watches, and nobody expected him to. Having assembled and trained his team, he did little of the work himself. Masters had apprentices and journeymen, and that’s how things were done. If it made sense to buy parts in, buy them in. Breguet was innovator, designer and quality controller, ensuring that Breguet watches deserved to carry his name. Some lower-priced Breguets were bought in complete, save perhaps for final finishing, but weren’t given series numbers. Some French watchmakers added ‘Elève de Breguet’ (student of Breguet) to their name, enhancing the desirability of their watches.
  
  
• We all know the picture. Poor Swiss farmers in remote valleys, grazing their cows in the summer, making watch parts in the winter. Edelweiss and cowbells, pinions and pallet forks. But why not arable farmers on flatter lands, guiding the plough behind teams of oxen? Dairy farmers had softer hands.
  
  
• The first industrial workers had come from the country, where work and time took a natural course. In Manchester, the Duke of Bridgewater’s workers were often late in returning from lunch, claiming that they hadn’t heard the single chime at one o’clock. The Duke had his clock strike thirteen. Forced to work to the clock, workers became suspicious of their employer’s clocks, especially when they could hear factory clocks striking at different times. The industrial revolution gave the working man a reason to have a watch of his own - not so much to be on time, but to make sure that he wasn’t being robbed of time.
  
  
• Aurel Bacs, the auctioneer who handles the world’s most momentous watch sales, wears a quartz watch. Admittedly it’s an F.P. Journe, rather than a Skagen Aktiv, but he wants to know what it feels like to be rational.
  
  
• Some in the watch industry sought to ridicule the Rolex Oyster, following its introduction in 1927. “Do fish really need to know the time?” said one.

[CFR]

• Some in the watch industry sought to ridicule the Rolex Oyster, following its introduction in 1927. “Do fish really need to know the time?” said one.

Fishes know everything - that's the reason why they don't talk.