Mechanism of operation of mechanical watches

When Apple Watch was introduced, it brought mixed reactions to interested people. While tech lovers are quite excited about this product, traditional watch lovers don't appreciate Apple Watch.

The leader of LMVH, a company specializing in the production of luxury watches even said that the Apple Watch is just like a design of students. The criticism is somewhat overstated, but also speaks of the pride of traditional watchmakers with their design capabilities.

Besides sophisticated design, another point that smartwatch can't catch up to mechanical watch is that it is in operation mechanism. While smartwatch uses batteries and electronic components, the mechanical clock works thanks to a series of very small and sophisticated mechanical details.

Picture 1 of Mechanism of operation of mechanical watches

Operation mechanism

Mechanical watch has 5 parts: energy generator, gear, outlet, control part and time display.

The energy is fed into the watch by twisting the clock or the dial on the watch automatically. The energy is then transmitted through the socket to the gears. The gears rotate and drive each other. In order to prevent moving gears from rotating in chaos, the clock needs an escape set. This escape runs in rhythm, continuously locks and unlocks the escape wheel so that the gear runs in rhythm.

The shaft of the gears is connected to the needle indicating the time (hour, minute or second). When we put these needles on the watch face, we will know the time.

With the operation mechanism mentioned above, it can be said that the simplest mechanical watch also has a lot of interesting "machines" inside, and is made up of very sophisticated parts. That's not to mention the more complex watch engines like tourbillon, chronograph . The most complex watches can take hundreds of hours to perform. This is the reason why watchmakers will never give up traditional watches to Apple Watch.

To better understand how the most basic mechanical watch works, see the video illustrated below:

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