10th October
A Fruit Day
A story about craftsmanship…
This is a story about craftsmanship. Or, at least, I think it is going to be… let’s see where it goes.
It begins about 20 years ago, when I was wandering through a rather seedy bit of Brisbane, not so many of those these days! I looked in the window of a pawn shop and a watch caught my eye.
For a long time, in fact ever since I could first buy a watch, I had an early TAG Heuer Quartz watch. It cost more than I could afford, but I really wanted that watch. I nearly lost it when it came off my wrist while riding a jet ski at Hamilton Island, I saw it tumble towards the water, dived after it, abandoning the craft, and caught up with it about four metres down. So that watch was special to me. The one I saw in the window was very similar: small and modest, not like the behemoths these days, in plain stainless steel and white. But I saw a word on the dial that my watch didn’t have: ‘automatic’. This was a true mechanical watch, not a quartz battery thing. It ran off clockwork, wound by my own movements. The price was worryingly low; perhaps they didn’t know what they had?
They knew all right, but they admitted that it didn’t keep very good time and the owner had a tiny wrist and hadn’t kept the strap links when she had the strap adjusted. So, it suited a tardy seven year old… not much of a market for a pawn shop.
I bought it and sent it off to the NZ TAG importers to have it serviced and the strap links restored. That doubled the purchase price, and then some, but I have worn it ever since, (my son inherited my quartz version on his 21st). It keeps almost perfect time, and that is what this story is really about.
Such a watch can keep time to within a minute a month. So it runs at a speed of within 1/50,000th of perfect. That is a remarkable feature of any engineering, but the components of a watch are tiny, microscopic even. The forces are too small to feel, the weights are in fractions of a gram, yet the whole thing comes together, accurate to with a 50,000th of design. Incredible.
And, of course, if I compare it with the quartz version, it is an inacurate slouch. Such is the power of electronics and modern technology, powered by a tiny vibrating crystal, relying on quantum mechanics to keep the randomness so small it will never lose or gain time. When that first TAG watch was built, it was expensive technology. Today, quartz timekeeping is disposable in cheapness.
That is our life today. We can quietly rely on the astonishing reliability and economy of manufacturing and get on with our lives. Or we can embrace the imperfection of craftsmanship, pay as much as a hundred times more, and get something less reliable.
It reminds me of wine. If I buy a bottle of mass produced, manufactured wine, I am very unlikely to see a faulty product. It will probably exactly match my expectations. Academic, since I don’t buy them. When I open hand made artisan wines I am often disappointed; I have great expectations and the result may not come up to my hopes, or, indeed the price I paid. But, like that watch, all the disappointments are forgotten when a true gem is opened. It will be the result of somebody’s hard graft. Maybe they aced it, maybe not, but when a person gets it right, it matters so much more than when a process does the job.
Cheers, Nigel
10th October
A Fruit Day
A story about craftsmanship…
This is a story about craftsmanship. Or, at least, I think it is going to be… let’s see where it goes.
It begins about 20 years ago, when I was wandering through a rather seedy bit of Brisbane, not so many of those these days! I looked in the window of a pawn shop and a watch caught my eye.
For a long time, in fact ever since I could first buy a watch, I had an early TAG Heuer Quartz watch. It cost more than I could afford, but I really wanted that watch. I nearly lost it when it came off my wrist while riding a jet ski at Hamilton Island, I saw it tumble towards the water, dived after it, abandoning the craft, and caught up with it about four metres down. So that watch was special to me. The one I saw in the window was very similar: small and modest, not like the behemoths these days, in plain stainless steel and white. But I saw a word on the dial that my watch didn’t have: ‘automatic’. This was a true mechanical watch, not a quartz battery thing. It ran off clockwork, wound by my own movements. The price was worryingly low; perhaps they didn’t know what they had?
They knew all right, but they admitted that it didn’t keep very good time and the owner had a tiny wrist and hadn’t kept the strap links when she had the strap adjusted. So, it suited a tardy seven year old… not much of a market for a pawn shop.
I bought it and sent it off to the NZ TAG importers to have it serviced and the strap links restored. That doubled the purchase price, and then some, but I have worn it ever since, (my son inherited my quartz version on his 21st). It keeps almost perfect time, and that is what this story is really about.
Such a watch can keep time to within a minute a month. So it runs at a speed of within 1/50,000th of perfect. That is a remarkable feature of any engineering, but the components of a watch are tiny, microscopic even. The forces are too small to feel, the weights are in fractions of a gram, yet the whole thing comes together, accurate to with a 50,000th of design. Incredible.
And, of course, if I compare it with the quartz version, it is an inacurate slouch. Such is the power of electronics and modern technology, powered by a tiny vibrating crystal, relying on quantum mechanics to keep the randomness so small it will never lose or gain time. When that first TAG watch was built, it was expensive technology. Today, quartz timekeeping is disposable in cheapness.
That is our life today. We can quietly rely on the astonishing reliability and economy of manufacturing and get on with our lives. Or we can embrace the imperfection of craftsmanship, pay as much as a hundred times more, and get something less reliable.
It reminds me of wine. If I buy a bottle of mass produced, manufactured wine, I am very unlikely to see a faulty product. It will probably exactly match my expectations. Academic, since I don’t buy them. When I open hand made artisan wines I am often disappointed; I have great expectations and the result may not come up to my hopes, or, indeed the price I paid. But, like that watch, all the disappointments are forgotten when a true gem is opened. It will be the result of somebody’s hard graft. Maybe they aced it, maybe not, but when a person gets it right, it matters so much more than when a process does the job.
Cheers, Nigel