If there’s one apparently universal truth among watch enthusiasts (other than Everybody Loves The Speedmaster) it’s this: Nobody Likes Batteries. Having grown up (more or less) during a time when quartz watches were administering the coup de grace to mechanical watches, I can easily remember why it was that I thought mechanical watches were cooler. The reason was simply that they didn’t need batteries to work, and I wanted to be prepared against the day when I’d accidentally fall through a wormhole to a time When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth and I’d want a watch that didn’t need to have a battery replaced. In all seriousness, though, battery power is somehow actively disturbing in something you’re going to have next to your skin every day. The really problematic thing about quartz watches is not that they are quartz per se: it is rather that the minute you put them on, they start to die.
However, there is a bit of an interesting development these days going on in watchmaking, which is to use mechanical methods of generating electricity, rather than relying on batteries. Now, we’re not talking Autoquartz or Kinetic technology (the Swiss and Seiko approaches to using something similar to an automatic winding system to recharge a battery) – we’re talking electromechanical watches that don’t use any battery system at all. We’ve already taken a look at the Midnight Nuit Lumineuse, which uses a piezoelectric generator (for a refresher, re-read the story here) and of course there’s the Seiko Spring Drive, as well as the Piaget 700P, both of which which use the mainspring to drive a microgenerator that provides a steady trickle of current to a quartz timing package. Then there’s also URWERK, who make the EMC watches; these are equipped with a built-in timing machine powered by a hand-crank (the EMC watches do have a capacitor, but no battery; though both store energy, they do so in different ways).
In addition to these, there’s now the HYT H4 Metropolis. The watch has two crowns. The upper, located at 2:00, is for winding and setting the watch. As you may already know, HYT watches are unique in using two immiscible fluids – one clear, one colored – which are pumped by a pair of elastic metal bellows, through a transparent tube. The boundary line between the fluids functions as the point for reading off the hours, while the minutes are read off from a conventional separate dial.
The HYT project struck me at first as a bit of a one-trick pony (albeit a technically very interesting one) but they’ve grown on me over the years; they’re mechanically ingenious, fun to wear, and generally enjoyable to have around, and watches like this. Even if they are priced out of reach of 99% of average watch consumers (and very much a niche product in terms of design) they help keep the conversation interesting.
If sheer wow factor and unadulterated fun are your thing, the HYT H4 Metropolis really delivers. The crown at 4:00 is used to charge a second mainspring, which in turn is used to power a small generator. A few turns of the crown are enough to store sufficient power in the second barrel, that if you want to know the time in the dark, you can press the button set into the lower crown, and this happens:
There are two blue LEDs mounted in the movement and the whole thing absolutely blazes when you turn the light mechanism on. (Pushing the crown in and then letting go gives you a roughly three-second show, and we generally got about three sequences before needed to rewind the generator.) It’s a really enjoyable effect, and not only that, it is actually part of a pretty long tradition in watchmaking – it's sort of a visually oriented cousin to the minute repeater, which was also developed to make it possible to tell the time at night “on demand.” You can, and some probably will, describe this as pointless and you'd be right. But so are remontoires, tourbillons, mechanical watches in general, cars that have more than ten horsepower, the entire contents of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and so on. Yes, Superluminova or, god knows, tritium gas capsules do the same thing – allow you to tell time in the dark – at approximately 1/100th the price, but thank heavens, man doesn't live by bread alone, or HODINKEE probably wouldn't be here in the first place.
There seem to be an awful lot of possibilities in using electromechanical power sources in watchmaking, and I suspect this might be just the tip of the iceberg. In using a mechanically powered, electrically driven complication like this one, you get the same pleasure of direct involvement with a mechanism you get from a complication like a repeater. It’s just direct human effort and interaction that makes things happen. The HYT H4 and its ilk are definitely onto something in terms of cool factor.
Case: titanium and titanium black DLC bezel. 51 mm x 17.9 mm. Rubber-clad screw-down black DLC titanium crowns at 2:30 and at 4:30 Black DLC titanium dome at 6 o'clock; convex sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating on the dial side; screw-down sapphire case-back. Water resistant to 50 m. 65-hour power reserve with mechanically powered generator, and manually actuated dual LED illumination system lighting the dial and showing the time at night "on demand." Limited edition of 100 pieces worldwide. Price, $94,000. Visit HYT.com right here.
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