Since mechanical watchmaking has been obsoleted (AFAIK) I'm curious what current industry is similarly motivated to develop miniature mechanical mechanisms? I'm talking about metalworking here -- not silicon wafer etched nano-bots. Thanks.
Um, mechanical watch making still exists, it's just been relegated to the high end of the market. There is also plenty of micro machining going on in various areas (medical, sensors, etc.).
Pete C.
I read a story in an airline magazine about some guy in China who makes wristwatches entirely by hand, a handful per year. He gets a decent sum for each one (especially for China), at least $10K US IIRC, maybe more, and he's got a long waiting list.
Mind you, you can pay around that much for an off-the-shelf Breitling or Blancpain.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
As far as scale goes, closer to watchmaking:
And what's wrong with silicon wafer etched nano-bots?
At night I use my WWII era Monarch Lathe and Atlas shaper, plus a motley collection of taiwanese mills and other machines, to build the plasma etchers and PECVD tools I use at the university to make much smaller stuff. Like a fluid pump 60 microns wide, a gas turbine wheel and stator housing
100 microns across, and torsion spring mechanisms less than a micron thick. All silicon and glass materials.Life is good!
Not even close! The Swiss watch industry is stronger and healthier than ever. Mostly high priced items though. It's just the cheap watches that have been replaced with quartz movements.
Some of the high priced watches have been fetching prices that have previously been unheard of. And especially the most complicated watch movement ever invented and ever produced, the "tourbillion", is now produced in limited edition quantities by a number of companies.
The Tourbillion mechanism was invented more than 200 years ago by Abraham-Louis Breguet.
It compensates the earth's gravitation, which has a negative effect on the precision of a watch. The Tourbillion ensures that the watch keeps perfect time.
The Tourbillion is one of the most difficult watches to make and is extremely complex and cost-intensive.
The Tourbillion system consists of assembling all the escapement parts - pallets wheel, pallets and balance - in a small mobile cage that rotates in one regular cycle in one direction (one rotation per minute), thus passing by every position. In a nutshell, the tourbillion is a device whose regular rotations effectively cancel the negative effects of the pull of gravity on the rate of mechanical watch movements.
The new tourbillions are fetching prices of $50,000.00 to $100,000.00 a piece and over. Most of the companies that make these fine pieces have names you have never heard of. Like Breguet, Girard-Perregaux, Chopard, Jacob & Co., Audemars Piguet, Patek-Phillipe, Roger Dubuis, Vacheron Constantin, Bovet, Armand Nicolet, Jaeger-LeCoultre and many others.
The modern equivalent:
jw
Hey Jim,
I recall very well in 1953 going on a special day trip to the local high-school (I was in grade 8). A lot of the people in the little town where I lived already had black and white televisions, but I had still another couple of years to go to before seeing my first true coloured TV. The trip was to see a demonstration of physics by two gentlemen from a place called Bells Labs, which I didn't associate at the time with Bell telephone! Anyway, one of the demonstrations was about some new device called a transistor. They showed a really large scale lab demo of one in operation, and then stunned us by controlling the candle-power of a 150 watt lamp with a transistor about the size of a school eraser. We were amazed. But THEN one of these guys said that they would be used to make coloured TV's in the future, and that someday a "chip" smaller than the "eraser" would have ALL the electronics to operate that TV (no hardware such as knobs, or the CRT), but that the cooling required would be the size of an average refrigerator!! I've never forgotten how stupid we thought that was! Not the heat sink part, but that you could shrink all those vacuum tubes onto the head of a pin!! TV's were nearly the size of a small fridge anyway, so that part wasn't amazing. Boy, how wrong both he and we were, eh!?!
Take care.
Brian Lawson, Bothwell, Ontario
That might have happened even without transistors. Vacuum-tube circuits can also be miniaturized using cold-cathode emitters instead of hot filaments; plasma TVs are a common example. This was the first big step from about 10 years earlier:
Dave
Depends on what you mean by equivalent. If you mean equally time consuming, detailed and complex, there are lots of hobby machinists out there doing incredible work. If you mean also equally lucrative to 18th and 19th century watchmaking you want to look at developmental machinists for places like SLAC or satellite makers. Look for the intersection of prototype production, new problems, and high value results. I once worked with a machinist at Tektronics that you could wave your hands and he could produce it in metal. Some of the mechanisms he produced you needed a loupe to appreciate. Worked on Ferrari engines in his spare time, because he enjoyed doing some low tolerance work :-)
Jim
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