Every watch conversation eventually arrives at the same fork: quartz or mechanical? One is a small electronic marvel that keeps nearly perfect time for the price of lunch. The other is a four-hundred-year-old idea, kept alive on purpose. Both are good at being watches. They are not good at the same things.
Here’s how each actually works, and the honest case for both — because the right answer depends entirely on what you want a watch for.
How quartz works
Inside a quartz watch, a battery sends current through a tiny quartz crystal cut in the shape of a tuning fork. Quartz has a convenient property: under voltage it vibrates at an extremely stable 32,768 times per second. A circuit counts those vibrations, and once a second it fires a pulse to a little motor that jumps the seconds hand forward one tick.
That’s why quartz watches tick once per second, why they’re accurate to a few seconds a month, and why they cost so little: the hard work is done by a mass-produced circuit, not by hand-fitted mechanics. It’s an engineering triumph, and no honest person in watchmaking pretends otherwise.
How an automatic works
A mechanical watch stores energy in a coiled spring and spends it through a gear train, one carefully rationed pulse at a time. The rationing is done by the escapement — a tiny anchor rocking against a toothed wheel, governed by a balance wheel that swings to and fro like a pendulum on a hairspring finer than a human hair. In the NH35 movement we build on, that balance swings six times every second — which is why the seconds hand glides where quartz ticks.
The “automatic” part is the winding: a weighted rotor spins with the motion of your wrist and coils the mainspring as you live your day. No battery, no charging, no cable. Worn regularly, the watch simply runs — and when you set it down, it keeps running for about forty hours more, roughly a hundred and forty parts working in a space smaller than a coin.
The honest scorecard
Nobody is served by pretending this is close on every axis. It isn’t:
- Accuracy: quartz wins, decisively. Seconds per month versus seconds per day.
- Convenience: quartz again — it runs untouched until the battery dies in a few years.
- Longevity: the mechanical watch wins, and it isn’t close. A quartz module is replaced when it fails; a mechanical movement is serviced — cleaned, oiled, brought back — indefinitely. There are mechanical watches from the 1950s keeping time today, and no consumer electronics from any decade with that record.
- Feel: the sweep of a mechanical seconds hand, the faint rotor whirr, the knowledge that it runs on your own motion — this is the whole reason mechanical watches survived the quartz era.
- Price honesty: a good quartz watch is cheap because it should be. A good mechanical watch costs more because dozens of parts were made, fitted, and regulated. What you’re paying for is real.
So which one?
If a watch is, to you, an instrument — buy quartz, buy it cheerfully, and never service anything. That’s the correct choice for that need.
But if a watch is an object — something to mark a chapter, hand down, or give to someone who matters — then it should probably be alive. A mechanical watch is a machine with a heartbeat and no expiry date, and it turns the mundane act of checking the time into a small pleasure, dozens of times a day.
We made our choice: every IVERA is automatic. If you’re ready to make yours, the collection is the fast way in, and the builder is the personal one.