The Modern Watch Escapement, And How It Got That Way

 of all the parts of a watch, the escapement is probably the one about which most owners are the least curious. This is not to be wondered at. In Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, the author, Robert Pirsig, is on a long road trip with a friend who has recently purchased a fine BMW motorcycle, the handlebars of which have begun to work loose. Pirsig advises making a shim to slide under the loose handlebar collars to help hold them in place and suggests cutting one out of a beer can. His friend reacts to this suggestion with irritation,replika órák despite the fact that sheet aluminum is actually an ideal solution to the problem.

Pirsig writes, "But to my surprise he didn’t see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all."

"As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW [the book was published in 1974 so don't be pokin' around looking for any $1,800 new BMW bikes today, my friends], the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!"

To me, one of the (many) larger take-aways from the anecdote is that someone who buys a fine mechanical watch, especially from brands which invest heavily in core timekeeping technology like metallurgy and escapement design, may actually be averse to understanding how the watch works – or, if not averse, at least uninterested, as having a grasp of the ins and outs of the mechanism is not the necessarily the owner's primary source of enjoyment in having the watch. There is nothing wrong per se with this, obviously. Plenty of people enjoy their cars immensely and feel perfectly legitimate pride of ownership without understanding how an automatic transmission works.

Moreover, the possibility of tweaking something mechanical is often part of what drives interest in mechanics, and a watch is not something that the average owner generally feels an impulse to tweak. Even back in 1974, when Pirsig lamented his friend's disinterest in the art of motorcycle maintenance, and when probably a lot more people were working on their own motorcycles, cars, and what have you than do so today, fiddling with the gubbins, as they say, was considered something best left to a watchmaker. 

All this tends to set up watch owners and enthusiasts for a certain degree of detachment from the technical, and apparently stone-cold boring, aspects of horology – and especially the rather arcane world of escapements. But there is a great deal of pleasure, if you are inclined to find it there, in understanding escapements, because the principles behind escapement design are universal principles of physics and mechanics. Once you have a sense of what escapements are doing, ticking away in the darkness under the dial, you really don't look at your watch in quite the same way ever again and indeed, you may even look differently at the world. Miracles are usually defined partly by their singular nature. But though the technology of the escapement strives for, and at its best achieves, ubiquity (historically, the most successful escapements are widely adopted), it is nonetheless miraculous for that. Appreciating this fact is by far the most democratic pleasure fine watchmaking offers – why, you don't even have to own a watch to get in on the fun.

In examining the modern watch escapement, we'll focus on those which are most widely adopted (we will not attempt a general history of the development of escapements; HODINKEE's Nick Manousos has, however, provided a useful general overview) .rolex replica All industrialized watch escapements are attempting to solve the same basic set of problems, and in understanding how they resemble, and differ from, each other, we can come to a new and deeper understanding of what makes a watch a watch.