HAND IN HAND
How many hands is too many on a watch? One? Two? Three? Four? Your choice...
Now for a quick breakdown of hands. Three might be the magic number for most, but there are other options, as our unevenly handed selection on the opposite page shows. When wristwatches first became a regular thing in the early 20th century, two hands per face was the norm. There were two good reasons for only displaying hours and minutes: 1) real estate was significantly decreased in the move from pocket to wrist and fewer working parts to shoehorn in meant less to go wrong; 2) even if nothing went wrong, watch accuracy of the day meant that unless you were a railwayman, losing a minute or two was to be expected. Modern watchmakers have better tech, but often stick with just the two hands for reasons of style, or perhaps historical fidelity, like with the Cartier Santos-Dumont.
As mechanical watch movements were refined, and miniaturisation techniques improved through the 20th century, the addition of a seconds hand became commonplace. Quartz movements reliably eclipsed mechanical for accuracy at some point around the time that Dylan went electric. But despite the defeat, mechanical watches have kept on going as a more desirable – and more expensive – product. For that reason, a mechanical seconds hand that sweeps gracefully stands out favourably compared to a quartz hand that hops.
A four-handed watch is often called a GMT in honour of the international timing standard and symbol of Britain’s one-time dominion over the seas, Greenwich Mean Time. A GMT watch has an additional hour hand – a useful function for tracking the time at home when you travel through different time zones, whenever such behaviour is permitted again.
A one-handed watch might seem like an off-the-wall choice. But in the earliest days of church clocks, there was only an hour hand, and it was the same idea with sundials. So it might be a fairly new idea for wristwatches, but really it is a return to time-telling 1.0. The German company MeisterSinger specialises in one-handed watches. They have large clear dials and you can tell the time accurately enough if you want, but that is not the point. By only having a single hand, it is clear this is a watch for someone not counting the minutes.
Whether you choose one hand or four, it is up to you. But if a nice handsome watch is what you are after, particularly when there is already quite enough to be thinking about in the world thank you very much, let’s cap it at four shall we? Richard Holt