What the heck is this watch without hands?
Without any hands at all? This absence raises questions right away. It arouses curiosity, perhaps even a little doubt... Just like the first time we heard about the development of a cordless telephone, a seamless garment or a new car that could head off on its journey without a driver. This sudden absence raises questions precisely because it calls into question the founding principle of the said object, with what mechanism, why and how it has always ticked away time. And then one wonders by what miracle, technical feat, ingenious mechanism or revolutionary system, it works just as well. And why no one had thought of designing it differently before.
From one watch-making advance to another In fact, the concept of a watch without hands is not exactly new. At the beginning of the last century, great watchmakers such as Bréguet had already developed timepieces that did away with this, so-called "jumping hour" timepieces with rotating dials. Meanwhile other companies had designed chic models with several windows in front of which numbers for the days, hours, minutes and seconds were displayed. These inventions - which required less knowledge and skill in order to tell the time - are the ancestors of the digital watches that invaded the market from the 1970s onwards, following the appearance of quartz movements. And, more recently, electronics, printed circuit boards and other components that allow the time to be displayed accurately, without difficulty or error.
Knowing how to tell the time on the basis of two or three
hands has never been easy. For all of us, it was something we learned in primary school and soon, not many decades later in fact, it will be one of the first day-to-day life skills that we lose us as soon as our eyesight starts to fail. This reading of the time is all the more complicated when the
hands are located on our wrist, within a dial whose diameter hardly ever exceeds 45 millimetres. You need a particularly sharp eye. Or to opt for thicker hands that would be more readable, but less precise... The eternal dilemma of
watch-making!
Watch indicators in perpetual motionIt is well known that the devil is in the detail. And watch hands are a real headache for watch designers, torn between aesthetics and function. Knowing that the compass they form must fit into a (slightly) larger dial in which indexes, numbers and, of course, a brand name will also be displayed. As a bonus, these hands move, they progress, they never stop... Some consider that their perpetual movement catches our eye first, that we must pay particular attention to these indicators. In other words, ensure that the hands are stylish, as they play an important role in the overall look of each model.
In watch-making, it is true that the movement is very important, so fascinating in fact that Klokers wanted to augment it by means of concentric discs that rotate on the same horizontal plane. Two or three discs, depending on the model, dividing the passing hours, minutes and seconds and are read along a vertical axis in the upper part of the dial. A vertical axis, called the index, which does not move (unlike the hands), which the eye can hold on to and trust as the hours, days and even years pass. In addition to its constancy, this reinvented reading of the time by Klokers does a great deal of good in a very rigid watch-making sector, where major innovations often boil down to pinions and cogs whose differences are - let's face it - invisible to the naked eye.
Texte : Frédéric Martin-Bernard
Copyright Klokers