The History of My Fascination with Timekeeping
As my wife will tell you -- yeah, that's a new development since the last major foray into blogging; I'm married now! -- over the last year or so I've developed a bit of a fascination with watches. I own a few, and have gotten back into the habit of wearing one on a regular basis.
To be fair though, this isn't an entirely new thing. When I was in about grade 5 or 6 Timex came out with their Ironman (not related to the Marvel character, to my knowledge) Triathlon watches. I don't know if these were actually a new line at the time, or if my awareness caught up with the advertising of the day around that time. In any case, I was hooked. These little devices did everything! Stopwatch, countdown timer, alarms, indiglo backlighting! I got one for my birthday and wore the crap out of that thing. It was basically glued to my wrist 24/7 until, as is the way with most quartz watches, it finally bricked itself. I think I may still have the head of the watch in a box somewhere (I swapped out the original rubber strap early on as it turns out my skin doesn't agree with rubber straps). It may be that the battery just died for the nth time and I never replaced it. Or it might actually have become a digital brick.
Anyway, my fascination with that particular Timex watch goes back to looking at my dad's watches when I was little. I remember him wearing a digital Casio sports watch most of the time, but he also had a giant Seiko dive watch he wore for scuba diving. It probably says something that I really wish I could give model numbers for these watches, such is the level of my current interest in the subject. Anyway, the Seiko was -- as was common of dive watches of the 70s and 80s -- an automatic. "A watch that powers itself just by wearing it? It never needs the battery replaced? How cool is that?" thought my single-digits-old self.
Between the time I got that first Timex and sometime in high school I went though a few other digital watches. As cool as I thought that automatic Seiko was, I associated more features with being cooler. So pictures of me between the ages of about 9 and 15 will likely feature a variety of digital Timex and Casio watches. I only ever owned one at a time, and wore it until it died beyond the point where a battery replacement was sufficient.
When I was 15 I signed up for my PADI open water diver course. Both my parents have been divers since they were in university, and my dad -- a former PADI instructor -- took all of us diving at the lake during the summers from a fairly young age. To commemorate the course I decided it was time for my first proper diving watch. I bought it from the same shop that was teaching the course. The watch was a Momentum M1 by St Moritz from Vancouver. I promptly swapped out the original rubber strap for a velcro one -- my preferred strap style at the time -- and wore it for years. It became my one-watch collection.
Sometime shortly after I finished my undergrad degree I entered the world of People Who Own Smartphones. The "smart" part is debatable, but the phone became my new pocketwatch, and the analogue diving watch was taken off most of the time. I'd wear it when diving, or out hiking, or other specific niche activities. But day-to-day I just stopped wearing it.
When I went back to school to do my master's I wound up doing a lot of international travel (see blog posts on here between 2010 and 2015). Paranoid about missing flights, I brought the old St Moritz watch out and started wearing it regularly again.
Fast-forward to about 2012 or 2013, I bought my first mechanical watch. It was an Ebay Special (tm). I have zero idea who the maker is, but it looks to be a pretty pedestrial 7-jewel movement. Hours, minutes, small-seconds at the 6 o'clock. It's pretty small (~36mm across) with very narrow lugs. It may have originally been a women's watch, though historically smaller watches were common for men too, so it's hard to say. In any case, wearing it on a leather bund-style strap gives it a little more wrist presence and makes it feel more modern. Because the watch has an unsealed caseback and has never been serviced since being in my possession, I tend not to wear it very often. Usually I bring it out for cosplay purposes; it goes nicely with my Victorian-style safari outfit -- despite the anachronism of a wristwatch with a Victorian pith helmet.
Thus started my 2-watch collection; one beater dive watch, and one anachronistic oddity.
Then last year happened. I decided I wanted a new watch, after realizing I had an unreliable mechanical one that should probably get looked at by a pro, and a pretty banged-up dive watch I'd owned for more than 15 years.
But, as is the way of things, I decided to do Some Research (tm) before buying a watch. This was going to be THE watch that I would wear to the exclusion of all others for the next many, many years. Or that was the plan, anyway.
Going through the rabbit hole of features, and movements, and case sizes, and bracelet options, and on and on... Eventually I discovered that you can get watches with slide rules on them. SLIDE RULES. So if I ever found myself in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and needed to speedily do unit conversions or ballpark multiplications and divisions, I'd be set! Clearly my love of digital watches with all the features hadn't gone away completely...
Anyway, after some musings I opted for the Seiko solar chronograph SSC009. It's solar-powered, so like my dad's automatic it never needs the battery changed. But it has a slide rule bezel, 60-minute stopwatch, an alarm (that doubles as a second time-zone display), and is waterproof to 100m. I'd still have my M1 for scuba diving and hiking, but for day-to-day use, this was the new watch of choice.
But then I thought "Wait, why not get a better dive watch too?" My second-choice watch, after all of my research, was a solar-powered Citizen BN0150. And I found it available new from a seller on Ebay for cheap. So I pulled the trigger and bought it too about a month later.
In the span of a month I'd gone from owning 1.5 watches (since the mechanical one was so rarely used it counts as 0.5 of a watch) to 3.5. I alternated between my new Seiko and my new Citizen day-today. I bought NATO straps for them to have more options. Eventually I bought an after-market steel bracelet for the Citizen (and just ordered an after-market bracelet for the Seiko last night).
Options. That's what I discovered.
Let's be honest, men don't get much in the way of choice when it comes to jewelry. Unless you're making a statement, necklaces are typically small and worn under the shirt where nobody sees them. I have no piercings, so earrings and the like are out. I occasionally wore a ring (I wear one far more regularly now that I'm married...), but that's about it. But if I had a few more watches I could express myself that way!
...and thus I fell completely down the rabbit hole.
(Left to right) Top: Maen Hudson 38 KSLE, TC-9 1972 Bronze, Vostok K-350617, Momentum M1, Citizen BN0150, Seiko SSC009.
Bottom: Orient FFDAH004Y (the watch I got married wearing), Guanqin GJ16034, the mystery mechanical watch, Seiko SNK803, Caliper Slide View SB40
Over the last year I've bought eight watches, with a ninth ordered that should ship sometime within the next month or two. None are especially expensive, and they all have their place in my regular rotation. When I bought my watch box I told my wife (fiancée at the time) I wouldn't ever own more watches than fit in that box, and so far I have exactly enough room once the soon-to-ship one arrives. Somewhere my mom has my grandfather's gold watch that my grandmother left for me, but nobody knows where that is (much to my chagrin). So when that eventually gets added to the collection I'll need to figure out what to get rid of. Or just admit that I can't keep that particular promise.
But that's a problem for another day.
What's on your wrist?
To be fair though, this isn't an entirely new thing. When I was in about grade 5 or 6 Timex came out with their Ironman (not related to the Marvel character, to my knowledge) Triathlon watches. I don't know if these were actually a new line at the time, or if my awareness caught up with the advertising of the day around that time. In any case, I was hooked. These little devices did everything! Stopwatch, countdown timer, alarms, indiglo backlighting! I got one for my birthday and wore the crap out of that thing. It was basically glued to my wrist 24/7 until, as is the way with most quartz watches, it finally bricked itself. I think I may still have the head of the watch in a box somewhere (I swapped out the original rubber strap early on as it turns out my skin doesn't agree with rubber straps). It may be that the battery just died for the nth time and I never replaced it. Or it might actually have become a digital brick.
Anyway, my fascination with that particular Timex watch goes back to looking at my dad's watches when I was little. I remember him wearing a digital Casio sports watch most of the time, but he also had a giant Seiko dive watch he wore for scuba diving. It probably says something that I really wish I could give model numbers for these watches, such is the level of my current interest in the subject. Anyway, the Seiko was -- as was common of dive watches of the 70s and 80s -- an automatic. "A watch that powers itself just by wearing it? It never needs the battery replaced? How cool is that?" thought my single-digits-old self.
Between the time I got that first Timex and sometime in high school I went though a few other digital watches. As cool as I thought that automatic Seiko was, I associated more features with being cooler. So pictures of me between the ages of about 9 and 15 will likely feature a variety of digital Timex and Casio watches. I only ever owned one at a time, and wore it until it died beyond the point where a battery replacement was sufficient.
When I was 15 I signed up for my PADI open water diver course. Both my parents have been divers since they were in university, and my dad -- a former PADI instructor -- took all of us diving at the lake during the summers from a fairly young age. To commemorate the course I decided it was time for my first proper diving watch. I bought it from the same shop that was teaching the course. The watch was a Momentum M1 by St Moritz from Vancouver. I promptly swapped out the original rubber strap for a velcro one -- my preferred strap style at the time -- and wore it for years. It became my one-watch collection.
Sometime shortly after I finished my undergrad degree I entered the world of People Who Own Smartphones. The "smart" part is debatable, but the phone became my new pocketwatch, and the analogue diving watch was taken off most of the time. I'd wear it when diving, or out hiking, or other specific niche activities. But day-to-day I just stopped wearing it.
When I went back to school to do my master's I wound up doing a lot of international travel (see blog posts on here between 2010 and 2015). Paranoid about missing flights, I brought the old St Moritz watch out and started wearing it regularly again.
Fast-forward to about 2012 or 2013, I bought my first mechanical watch. It was an Ebay Special (tm). I have zero idea who the maker is, but it looks to be a pretty pedestrial 7-jewel movement. Hours, minutes, small-seconds at the 6 o'clock. It's pretty small (~36mm across) with very narrow lugs. It may have originally been a women's watch, though historically smaller watches were common for men too, so it's hard to say. In any case, wearing it on a leather bund-style strap gives it a little more wrist presence and makes it feel more modern. Because the watch has an unsealed caseback and has never been serviced since being in my possession, I tend not to wear it very often. Usually I bring it out for cosplay purposes; it goes nicely with my Victorian-style safari outfit -- despite the anachronism of a wristwatch with a Victorian pith helmet.
Thus started my 2-watch collection; one beater dive watch, and one anachronistic oddity.
Then last year happened. I decided I wanted a new watch, after realizing I had an unreliable mechanical one that should probably get looked at by a pro, and a pretty banged-up dive watch I'd owned for more than 15 years.
But, as is the way of things, I decided to do Some Research (tm) before buying a watch. This was going to be THE watch that I would wear to the exclusion of all others for the next many, many years. Or that was the plan, anyway.
Going through the rabbit hole of features, and movements, and case sizes, and bracelet options, and on and on... Eventually I discovered that you can get watches with slide rules on them. SLIDE RULES. So if I ever found myself in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and needed to speedily do unit conversions or ballpark multiplications and divisions, I'd be set! Clearly my love of digital watches with all the features hadn't gone away completely...
Anyway, after some musings I opted for the Seiko solar chronograph SSC009. It's solar-powered, so like my dad's automatic it never needs the battery changed. But it has a slide rule bezel, 60-minute stopwatch, an alarm (that doubles as a second time-zone display), and is waterproof to 100m. I'd still have my M1 for scuba diving and hiking, but for day-to-day use, this was the new watch of choice.
But then I thought "Wait, why not get a better dive watch too?" My second-choice watch, after all of my research, was a solar-powered Citizen BN0150. And I found it available new from a seller on Ebay for cheap. So I pulled the trigger and bought it too about a month later.
In the span of a month I'd gone from owning 1.5 watches (since the mechanical one was so rarely used it counts as 0.5 of a watch) to 3.5. I alternated between my new Seiko and my new Citizen day-today. I bought NATO straps for them to have more options. Eventually I bought an after-market steel bracelet for the Citizen (and just ordered an after-market bracelet for the Seiko last night).
Options. That's what I discovered.
Let's be honest, men don't get much in the way of choice when it comes to jewelry. Unless you're making a statement, necklaces are typically small and worn under the shirt where nobody sees them. I have no piercings, so earrings and the like are out. I occasionally wore a ring (I wear one far more regularly now that I'm married...), but that's about it. But if I had a few more watches I could express myself that way!
...and thus I fell completely down the rabbit hole.
(Left to right) Top: Maen Hudson 38 KSLE, TC-9 1972 Bronze, Vostok K-350617, Momentum M1, Citizen BN0150, Seiko SSC009.
Bottom: Orient FFDAH004Y (the watch I got married wearing), Guanqin GJ16034, the mystery mechanical watch, Seiko SNK803, Caliper Slide View SB40
Over the last year I've bought eight watches, with a ninth ordered that should ship sometime within the next month or two. None are especially expensive, and they all have their place in my regular rotation. When I bought my watch box I told my wife (fiancée at the time) I wouldn't ever own more watches than fit in that box, and so far I have exactly enough room once the soon-to-ship one arrives. Somewhere my mom has my grandfather's gold watch that my grandmother left for me, but nobody knows where that is (much to my chagrin). So when that eventually gets added to the collection I'll need to figure out what to get rid of. Or just admit that I can't keep that particular promise.
But that's a problem for another day.
What's on your wrist?