There are watches and then there are watches, but powering the movement is an option open for debate. There is little argument that since the introduction of quartz timepieces, no better means of keeping accurate time has arrived on the market. It is a very simple process, as when a small electrical charge is passed through quartz it will vibrate at a consistent frequency, creating and maintain a precise time-base for watches.

In the 1970s the first quartz watches were introduced in the form of LED display watches and were definitely not cheap. However, as work continued on the printed circuit board to be able to power the quartz crystal and the light emitting diodes with a very small battery. The Swiss watchmakers took this challenge and today there are quartz watches that keep almost perfect time, losing about 10 seconds per month, at very reasonable prices.

Before quartz crystal there was the manually wound watch. The movement depended on a spring that could be wound up and as it un-wound it turned the movement. The biggest problem with the manually wound watch was people forgetting to wind it. On top of that, if it was wound too tight, there was a tendency for the spring to break, rendering the watch useless. For top-end watches it could be fixed for a reasonable price but for those on the lower spectrum for quality, it would usually cost more to fix it than to replace.

To overcome the over-winding or non-winding of watches, they began to be made with the ability to wind themselves. Actually, the watch hands did not grab the stem and tighten the spring, rather the movement was revised to allow the motion of the wearer during normal activities to use gravity in moving the mechanism to wind the watch’s spring.