‘Why on earth would you buy a $3500 watch?’

I get that a lot. From relatives, from friends, and even on a few occasions, from strangers. Purchasing expensive and unique timepieces are one of those things that some people will never get. That’s perfectly fine by me, because if the rest of the world was wearing Brietlings, Rolexes, Omegas, or Patek Philippes, then I probably wouldn’t have the luxury of writing this post.

timepieces

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that cheap watch you bought at Walmart or that Mickey Mouse timepiece you found in a box of cereal. For the price of a brand new Rolex, you can buy over a hundred plastic Timex watches. Does a Rolex keep better time than a Timex? Goodness, no.

What everybody wants to know is what’s wrong with their $50 Timex watch. It keeps track of time fine. It’s waterproof. Hey, there’s even a spiffy Indiglo function.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that cheap watch you bought at Walmart or that Mickey Mouse timepiece you found in a box of cereal. For the price of a brand new Rolex, you can buy over a hundred plastic Timex watches. Does a Rolex keep better time than a Timex? Goodness, no. A Timex is actually much more accurate than the most well made Rolex watches — which are often off by at least a handful of seconds a day.

Bet that took you by surprise.

Well, I’m not just going to just tell you why you should invest in an classy (though often expensive) mechanical timepiece. I’m going to show you.

The Omega Aqua Terra was my first real love and first expensive timepiece. She broke my heart and was stolen from my car during the summer of 2006, but was promptly — though expensively — replaced by my insurance company within weeks. The watch is subtle, yet powerful and a classic beauty. Appropriate for all occasions and nearly everything I wear, it’s a watch that isn’t met with too many incredulous stares, but deserves a second look.

The well known Invicta 9937 is an hommage (less eloquently, a copy) of the legendary Rolex Submariner/Sea Dweller. Although its design is almost a direct replica of the more expensive Rolex, the watch holds its ground, a testament to its rugged Swiss movement (an ETA 2824).

More hefty, less expensive, and less formal than my Omega, this watch has quickly become my standard day-to-day. A watch I can wear wherever and whenever, especially when I’m a bit timid of sporting the overly expensive Omega.

My love for mechanical watches was probably fueled by my father’s collection, which contains among other timepieces, a Rolex Datejust given to him by my grandmother…in 1963! Forty years later and after some restoration by Rolex, the watch is beating steadily and looks just as beautiful as ever.

Most watches mass produced by Timex, Seiko, Casio, or whatever, are composed of electronic gizmos. These watches have a teeny quartz crystal under the casing which resonates or beats at a very distinct and very fast frequency. In turn, this frequency is used by the electronic mainboard to count the seconds, the minutes, and eventually the hours.

So from the frantic beating of the quartz, you get the steady tick, tick, tick of your watch every second.

Here’s the beauty of some of the timepieces you might see made by Rolex or Omega: there’s not a single electronic component to be found. No quartz crystals vibrating at a billion beats per second. No batteries pulsing energy through the mass of electronic transistors, wires, and boards. Nada. Zip. Zero.

No, these watches are purely mechanical. Using nothing but teensy-weensy gears, springs, screws, rotors, and pallets, these watches are counting the very seconds of your day. Accurately and precisely. Now doesn’t that blow your fucking mind?

The concept is simple: The mechanical watch uses the energy from a wound spring and keeps track of time through the highly regulated release of that energy through a set of gears and an escapement. The escapement is the engine of the movement and like the quartz crystal, beats or swings at a very precise rate.

Automatic watches, which encompasses nearly all modern mechanical watches, are powered by a rotor or weight that swings with the motion of your wrist as you’re going through your mundane day-to-day routines. And here lies another difference between an automatic/mechanical watch like a Rolex and a quartz watch like a Timex: Automatic watches will only keep ticking if you wear them. Their power supply quickly depletes in one or two days, and so it’s not uncommon to have to rewind and resync your watch with the computer clock after having left it inert on your desk for the weekend.

Inconvenient? Perhaps. But that’s the beauty of a mechanical watch. It’s not some cold robotic clunker. It’s a watch with a heart that literally depends on your existance to continue beating.

What heart? Take a look at the below animation of a typical escapement of a watch.

The spinny oscillating thing is called the balance wheel and is considered to be the heart of the watch. The wheel spins left 280 degrees (one beat), and then right 280 degrees (another beat). These periodic beats are then transferred to other gears and components which are used to keep time forever ticking.

How often does it beat? About 28,800 beats per hour. That little wheel is swinging to and fro 28,800 times an hour. And let’s not forget that through all this time and through all this elaborate beating, the watch has to deal with changes in temperature, changes in position, inertial forces applied by the wearer, shock, and what not.

Should a pallet (the pink nibs) fail to engage properly on only one out of 1,000 cycles, the error in time-keeping would amount to hours per day. It’s amazing that the best mechanical watches are configured to lose or gain up to 2-5 seconds in even the most extreme conditions.

So now I hope you can understand my fascination with mechanical watches. In today’s cold and apathetic world fueled by things like instant messenging, mass produced electronics, downtown hustle and bustle, and of course the ubiquitous chains of fast food restaurants, we’re often left feeling tired and breathless.

A mechanical watch is a historical, cultural, and mechanical marvel — standing as one of mankind’s most ingenious and calculated inventions. It’s a watch that possesses a soul and a beating heart. It’s a constant companion through life and rewards the attention and energy you provide by keeping track of that elusive maiden known as Time.

We tend to forget and neglect things that are independent of our attention. This explains why we don’t think of toasters, gluesticks, or Lays Potato Chips as being our constant companions in life.

Besides, if you think your best friend in life is a toaster, you’ve got bigger issues than choosing between a Rolex or an Omega. You freak.

To: Phil
From: Minh
Date: August 21, 2006
Subject: Tonight!

u better put all that math aside tonight. prison break is on.

To the few ladies and gentlemen of Toronto who will undoubtedly be checking to see what atrocious lies I’ll be spreading about my visit: thank you for your company, your hospitality, and especially your late night candor.

If you ever do stop by Ottawa, please give me a ring and I will delight in showing you the many beautiful charms Ottawa has that Toronto does not. I assure you, your eyes will welcome the downtown area, where signs publicizing kinky and taboo subjects are a rarity rather than the norm.

That is, unless you enjoy frequenting those 60+ gay/lesbian parties thrown by monkeys with foot fetishes I read on posters everwhere during my visit.

Today, instead of being a good math geek, I decided to skip my lectures and instead spend half a day exploring Casa Loma — literally ‘House on the Hill’.

It’s certainly a lovely and very majestic locale, but unfortunately the dozens of tourists and crowds of whiny children with icky fingers ruined the experiece for me.

There’s a food court in the basement of the building (somehow, I doubt very much Sir Henry Pellatt intended a McDonalds to be built within the confines of his castle), and the obligatory signs and brochures on the higher levels of the castle. It’s an odd study in contrasts — the feeling of being in a historical and grandiose location constantly clashing with the modern sell-out feeling of being in a tourist attraction.

And dude, they charged me $2 for a bottle of water. Bastards ripped me off.

Later on, I spotted a girl wearing a Casa Loma t-shirt and sitting dejectedly on one of the benches in the rear gardens. The following conversation ensued:

“Hi, do you work here?”

She looked up and feigned what I could only imagine was the most cheerful smile she could muster in her present state. “I sure do.”

“Why is it that all the staff here look so depressed?”

It was true. I had spotted at least half a dozen employees within the castle who looked like they were in need of some serious booze. Or at the very least, a good sobbing.

“Oh. You don’t wanna know.”

“Sure I do.”

“It’s just the long days, y’know? And the stupid questions we get.”

“What stupid questions?”

“Like, everyday I get a handful of people who ask me if our audio [tour] cassettes are available in American.”

I laughed. “And what do you say?”

She looked at me, flashed her well-rehearsed Casa Loma smile, and said deadpan, “I’m sorry, we don’t carry those. Will English work?”

7:00 AM: Wake up to the blaring of my alarm clock. First lecture doesn’t begin until 10:00, but due to the fact I have no internet connection, I literally have no idea what room to arrive in. BA 1134? BA 1135? BA 2315? I need to find someone with an internet connection.

8:00 AM: Starving. But at least not naked anymore. Wander in the direction of downtown in search of nourishment.

8:30 AM: Find a Subway restaurant and purchase an overpriced foot long meatball sub. Ask the cashier for stamps toward my next purchase and she laughs at me, saying, ‘We haven’t had stamps for a long time now. Where have you been?’. With a ‘hmph’, I resist the urge to pilfer her tip jar and instead trudge back to residence.

9:00 AM: Meatball sub successfully arrived in tummy. So thirsty. Seek out bathroom with a mug and drink the tap water. Lingering thoughts about E-Coli.

9:15 AM: Make it to the Bahen (BA) building and peak into each and every class involving an arrangement of the numbers 1, 2, 4, or 5. Give up quickly.

9:30 AM: Knock on an office door and ask the person to let me use the internet. No threats necessary. It’s 2135.

10:00 AM: Lecture begins.

10:05 AM: Examine the students in the room. There are about a dozen. Three students are obviously Canadian: One jerk sitting at the back of the room with his feet up on the table, a timid asian who’s sitting in the far left corner, as if he’s afraid of human contact, and your distinguished author. The Ukranians are packed in one group — about nine of them.

10:10 AM: Further contact with the Ukranian math students have led me to conclude that Ukranians are for the most part very lanky, very awkward, and very, young looking. In fact, about half of the guys remind me of 15-16 year olds. The girls (there are 3 of them) look older and could pass off as being 17-19. For the record, the Ukranians are all 5th or 6th year students — you do the math.

10:15 AM: My god. What a geekfest.

10:18 AM: The professor goes, ‘Let’s begin with a Riemann Surface’. Pause. ‘Does anybody remember what a Riemann Surface is?’

10:19 AM: ‘Chirp, chirp’, go the crickets.

10:20 AM: ‘Well, let me do a brief review. A Riemann Surface is a connected complex analytic manifold of complex dimension 1.’

10:21 AM: Gee, thanks for the review. Really cleared everything up for me.

10:50 AM: Theorem 3.2 (Hyperbolic Compactness). If S and T are hyperbolic Riemann surfaces, then the space Hol(S, T) of holomorphic maps is locally compact and sigma-compact. Furthermore, if K in S and K’ in T are nonvacuous compact subsets, then the set of all holomorphic maps f, from S to T satisfying f(K) subset of K’ forms a compact subset of Hol(S, T).

11:15 AM: What. The. Fuck.

11:20 AM: Any Riemann surface which is not homeomorphic to the sphere or torus (in the compact case), or homeomorphic to the plane or cylinder (in the noncompact case), must necessarily be hyperbolic, with universal covering surface conformally isomorphic to the unit disk.

11:30 AM: Eyes begin to glaze over. If I hear the word ‘homeomorphic’ one more time, I’m gonna flip out. And take half a dozen Ukraines with me.

11:50 AM: Lecture 2 ends. A good thing. Was beginning to throw up in my mouth.

11:55 AM: Make my way back to residence. Angry. Very angry. I didn’t come to Toronto to learn about this seizure inducing crap. The lecture was crap and the material was not presented in an easy-to-understand manner. I could have learnt more from a textbook — assuming that I actually did care about holomorphic dynamical systems.

12:05 PM: Meet with the residence porter. No waiting this time. Must be the murderous glint in my eyes.

12:10 PM: Tell the porter I’m going to cut my trip short. Reason? Holomorphic Dynamical Systems is just not working out for me. She tells me I won’t be able to get this week’s rent back. Bastards have me trapped.

3:00 PM: Third lecture begins, this time given by a different mathematician.

3:33 PM: Better this time around, but still not great. Material was more applicable and focused on the topic of differential equations with noise. The mathematical formulation of a very random and very chaotic system known as Brownian Motion was described and modeled. Though much of the math was oriented towards probabilists — involving stochastics, I’m comfortable enough to get a little something out of the lecture.

4:00 PM: Hungry. Always hungry. Trek downtown once more.

4:30 PM: Locate an A & P grocery store. Pile the following into a cart: Frozen pizza, sliced bread, peanut butter, strawberry jam, 1 L of milk, 2 L of apple juice, 1 L of chocolate soya milk, and a packet of rice cakes. Total cost: $22.

6:00 PM: Return to residence and wander the basement in search of an oven for my pizza.

6:25 PM: What the hell. They don’t have an oven here?

7:00 PM: Locate the residence’s only kitchen, but with no oven in sight. The kitchen/common’s room is much more posh than my own floor’s lounge.

7:30 PM: Microwaved pizza is the best I can do. Uncooked yeast, here I come.

8:15 PM: Dude. Totally demolished that pizza. So proud of myself.

9:15 PM: Have taken complete control of the kitchen/commons room. Brought down my laptop, coffeemaker, pillow, documents, and personal effects. Marked my territory appropriately. I live here now.

3:00 AM: Fell asleep with thoughts towards a potentially daring prison escape.