After many mumble jumbles from previous posts, this is at last my first “slightly educating” post.
I have just bought a new watch (several months ago. forget when..). So as for now I already have three watches in my collection (well, yeah, i wrote that just to show off. HAHA. Nevertheless, they are all mid-low range watches, nothing to fuss about).
My first watch is a Fossil watch. I like its look: manual hands in front and LED display in the background, which can be turned off and showing light gray dull background instead; very simple. The band is leather, which I firstly intended to wear to the rig site (metal band watches are generally prohibited). But after much consideration, it was too good-looking to be worn at places like that. 
That’s how I decided to buy my second watch.
It was a G-Shock watch. It is a little bit too large for my taste, but it looks so sporty and fit for outdoor. It has certain youth vitality in it, like innocent teens oblivious of fashion and beauty, yet proud of its complexity of non-necessities. It has a leather band, looks robust, can withstand shock (hence the name G-shock), and is water resistant. It has timer, stopwatch, alarm functions, and alternate choices of pre-defined digital time for several cities in several time zones (which all I seldom use anyway). Like my Fossil, it has dual displays: manual hands in the front and several LED displays at the background showing seconds, digital time, date, and day, which all can be interchanged. Just what perfect for my kind of work.
My third watch has no logically-deducted story of motivation in buying it. I, who saw it, liked it, and was pushed by a little bit of my shopping-freak-attitude, decided to buy it.
It is a Swatch (people said it was short for ‘Swiss Watch’, since the company is in Swiss. But Swatch claimed it was not, instead it was ‘Second Watch’ - well, to me it sounds like they are selling a used watch, like how we use here in Indonesia the word “second” in “hape second”). For you who have no idea of what Swatch is, try its official website here.
I never like Swatch watches. I like simplicity and elegance in a watch, and they just lack it. Many of them are just simply juvenile, eccentric, bursting with color madness, and so on. It might look good at other people, but not me. This one, though, captured my heart in an instant.
You can see all the gears and mechanics through the exposed back, which people usually call “skeleton watch”.
Many people have been interested by it. The view to the mechanics seems to provide a little bit of awe, especially to those who are not watch-freak (many people are not, I assure you. I myself am not too).
So at the time I bought it, I had no idea what kind of watch it was. I simply gave in to its look and fell in love.
At the second day of owning it, the watch stopped moving.
The sales lady told us before that it was an Automatic and I knew from her it did not operate on battery. So the energy had to have come from kinetic energy, I thought. I was partly right. I shocked it here and there.
It ticked a little bit. Then stopped again. I was ready to go to the Swatch shop to claim my money back and brought all my gang along to ransack the place if they refused (the one who would get ransacked was probably me.. haha).
Luckily I was saved from my embarrassment and there was this thing called Internet and Mr. Google.
So here’s a little knowledge about watches to spare you the humiliation you might get. (I still don’t know many damn about many parts of watch, you should consult Mr. Google for more details).
============= BASIC KNOWLEDGE OF WATCH =================
As you aware, lots of watches nowadays are not skeletons; that is, you can not see its mechanics of the watch. The reason might be that those watches have no worthy mechanics beauty to display to you. Such watches almost certainly operate on battery, from which they get the name of “digital” or “electronic” watch.
‘Digital’ term does not constrict to watches with digital display. Watches with manual hands can also be digital watches. Digital, in this case, refers more to the source of “time-clocking” that turns the watch. Digital watch uses crystal for its source of time. (WHAT? you don’t know what crystal is?? GO BACK TO HIGH SCHOOL!! Crystal is…………. UMmmMm, i guess i should go checking my chemical physics textbook first…. LOL. Search Madame Wikipedia, will you?)
Crystals, like quartz, have certain characteristics when they are exposed to electricity, which is dubbed piezoelectric. They would give out vibration in certain frequency (each crystal has unique voltage-frequency-temperature response). The oscillation of the crystal is then used by watch-maker to give timely periodic power to motors that will turn your watch.
The frequency of its oscillation is high, that is, it vibrates very quickly. Watch-maker has to reduce its frequency until it becomes 1 Hz for your second-hand, 60 Hz for minute-hand, and so-on (If so, your second-hand would move in staccato manner, tick tick tick per second. But minute-hand and hour-hand usually move in smoother sweep, so they might lower still the frequency but make the hands sweep at smaller distance - honestly I don’t know if it’s true, but my logically more developed brain tells me so… haha). And the electricity needed to make the crystal oscillate comes naturally from the battery provided. Crystal used for this purpose is mainly Quartz, which is very stable.
Digital or electronics watch like that is very accurate (Wiki says it could be accurate to 500 miliseconds per day or better), yet cheap to make (that’s how you can see 10,000 IDR watches everywhere).
But long before Quartz was utilized for time-source, watch maker depended on manual-source to turn the hands of a watch. They used spring (well, I don’t have to use Past Tense here, since they still do it nowadays, but WTH!).
You don’t have to imagine spring as a helix-wound metal. Like in my watch, it was a long thin piece of metal, wound tightly in flat circular shape.
For those who miss Physics class in first and second years of high school (or those who kept failing them yet got promoted after all since the school was to tired to deal with you), spring is a energy-storing thing. If you give force to it to its compressed state, and keep its position, it will store your force energy. But when you release it, it will “spring” back to its relaxed state and release all the energy you have stored in it and return to its original shape.
That is what they use in “manual” or “mechanical” watch. The spring in mechanic watch is manually wound to give it its energy to turn the watch. As the spring slowly returns to its relaxed state, it releases the energy that will turn the gears and mechanics, which in turn will move the watch hands through a series of interconnecting gears and stuffs. They use a kind of “escapement” technique to convert manual simple unwinding energy of the spring into a periodic movement to move the hands. Apparently, the mechanics of it are complicated, and I can’t understand it, or I would have become Sylar, wouldn’t I?
As I mentioned, mechanic watch user has to manually wound the spring of his watch every time to sustain the watch (usually through the crown, which most watches have now at the side of their body). If you live in this century and you are one with tight schedule moving your ass around here and there, you would agree that it is a pain in the ass-crack to keep a reminder in your brain to turn your watch every time.
So the watch maker somehow came to the idea of making an Automatic.
Don’t get confused with the term ‘Automatic’. The first time I heard it, I thought that my watch was automatically moving on itself with no battery. Well, part of it is true.
Automatic is basically a manual mechanical watch with an automatic winding mechanism. In other words, you MIGHT not need to manually wind the spring every time. They use a kind of half-circular heavy metal, which they call rotor, usually located at the back of the watch, that can spin on its axle. As you move your hand, this rotor will spin (can be back or forth) and its spin energy will be used to wind back the spring. You have to be active with that one to maintain the watch (I tried KamaSutra Yoga, etc).
But what if the rotor is not spinned lot enough to maintain the spring? Say, if I go to rig-site and leave my watch be, it would certainly lose its energy and stop. Yes. But you could usually wind the spring manually, like in manual mechanical watch. But just how much to wind (how many turns should I give to the crown)? (Old watches had problems of over-winding, that is, people wind the spring too much that the spring breaks). Well, modern automatic watches are equipped with mechanism to bypass over-winding. But I usually look at the spring. If it is compressed tight enough, I would let it be.
Since the manual and automatic watch depends on manual force, it is sadly less accurate than the digital watch in time-keeping (Wiki said it could be off several seconds a day). Yet it is (nowadays) usually more expensive than digital watch. This is because people consider such watches are more elegant and unique. Every piece of the watch is like an individual beauty which is put together to work altogether harmoniously, like in a orchestra. There is personal touch to it: the hand of its designer who places and arranges every components, that you can’t get with digital watches. And skeleton watches boast the complex handsome mechanism and its personal message for view. It is harmonious. It is intricate. And it proves that fashion does not always have to do with function, but always beauty.
Some automatic can be very expensive. I don’t know why exactly. It could be the jewels (mechanical watch needs jewels for its gears as bearing, that is to prevent wash and friction), or it could be the more-refined mechanics, or anything. Ask the watch freak or Google (lol)
The lesson is not over.
There is the last kind of watch. Kinetic watch.
Kinetic watch comes from the combination of automatic and digital watch. It uses crystal as the clocking source, but the electricity provided is not from battery only, but from the same rotor thing that provides energy just like in Automatic watch. The energy produced by the spinning of the heavy metal ‘rotor’ is converted or stored into electricity in capacitors or rechargeable battery (which can have decades of lifetime - according to madame Wiki). This electricity, in turns, make the crystal to oscillate.
Kinetic watch is surely combining both advantages of digital and automatic watch. It does not require battery (like automatic) and yet is very accurate (like digital). If Automatic can’t get back to work when it looses its spring energy after a few shocks here and there, Kinetic surely can. Just shock it a little, there would be enough temporary energy to make it move. Wear it longer and let the natural movement of your hand turn the rotor, it would store enough energy to sustain the watch.
Yet, since it does not have mechanical complexity like Automatic, Kinetic usually is only skeleton at the back part where you can see its rotor spinning.
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Back to my Swatch, of which nickname is Irony.
It is definitely an Automatic. There is no hour marker display on the rim, except for four dots to indicate 12, 3, 6, and 9 o’clock. It is DEFINITELY not for people who are strict in keeping time. So if you make an appointment with me, and I am late, you can almost be certain that I am probably wearing my Swatch. LOL.
And.. Yes, this watch cost me quite some, but compared to other Automatic watches, it is definitely nothing. So let’s say this is a win-win solution. Nice looking watch with lower price… 
