The house is a more cheerful alive place for the sounds of mechanical clocks, I still wear my and my dad's old Accutrons as daily watches, nothing digital except my phone and a digital master clock that my father inset into a cabinet he built for his stereo gear; the gear long gone but the cabinet a treasured piece here behind my chair.
Its not from some aversion to technology, but the cold silence of a house, a silence broken only by Siri having a bitch-fight with Alexa, just is too sterile for me.
A good master linked in to the standard time system always intrigued my dad; he was a physicist and a Navy man. He always loved the latest, carefully researched to make sure the choice was technically the best. Occasionally that bit him; he put his money in Beta and was quite annoyed VHS won out, since the former was better. He hated when marketing beat out technical superiority.
His Accutron watch was another example. They were the most accurate watch in their time, a 360 Hz tuning fork excited by twin coils, with a pawl taken off the fork to drive the gear-train. It was not too many years afterward that the quartz oscillator LCD digitals came out and overtook them, knocking the Accutrons out of the marketplace.
His ended up first in a drawer, then given to me. I've kept it in good repair now for almost a half century myself and still wear it, it having outlasted so many thousands of digitals, now. I also still wear my own, a railroad approved version I bought when I first "went railroading".
He gave his sons each one of the early Texas Instrument LCD watches when they first came out. The latest and greatest tech, I made the mistake of wearing it to work one night. The magnetic field from the traction motors and generator of the locomotive apparently wiped the display clean.
That was one of those life lessons in technology being very impressive, but tech by itself without robustness, reliability, "user-friendliness", very cool for my dad but not necessarily fit-for-purpose, a lesson I keep relearning (the latest being the iPhone fiasco I spoke of here).
Meanwhile, there are clocks here near two-hundred years old, lovely pocket watches some of which are heirloom, my old Army watch, all with some version of that lovely clockwork mechanism and some just works of art.
I admire them and their makers greatly.
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