This article was original published by Acculation on another site.
Hyetis Crossbow: smartwatch from outer space?
The Hyetis Crossbow has just gone on presale at this writing, and we’re sure this will hybrid smartwatch combined with traditional mechanical watch will peak the interest of some of our readers. We’ve previously written about the coming smartwatch revolution. Swiss watchmakers, of course, feel the need to modernize. Computer are getting smaller thanks to Moore’s law. That means that your future smartwatch will eventually be as powerful as today’s desktops (and have killers apps to boot). Every major manufacturing (Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Google) has announced plans to come out with one.
A smartwatch is infinitely more practical, often lighter, and tells time much better than one of these “traditional” Swiss automatic chronometers. (Which are 1930s technology, cost hundreds or thousands more than a smartwatch, don’t have atomic/network time, and are heavy.)
John Biggs of Tech Crunch referred to the Hyetis as the “smart watch from outer space.” It has GPS and … the latest 1930s Swiss Technology in the form of an automatic movement.
GPS and the latest 1930s technology?
There is some irony here. In order to have GPS, you need to have an extremely accurate clock. There is a link between timekeeping an navigation, as vividly described in Dave Sobel’s book Longitude or theGambon’s film of the same name 19th century seafarers needed very precise clocks in order to determine their position (longitude), and problem proved to be scientifically very thorny. The British Monarchy even offered a large cash prize, sort of a 19th century X-Prize, for an accurately clock that would enable better navigation. The consensus at the time was large clocks would be more accurate than smaller clocks, but ultimately the problem was solved by making a very small clock. (This tradition continues today, with atomic clocks achieving their unrivaled accuracy by using atoms as their tiny pendulums.) We’ve already described in a previous post how religious considerations led to the carrying of clocks and watches in Switzerland, but navigation was one of the original motivations for building small, portable mechanical clocks.
GPS navigation also involves time. Each GPS satellite carries an atomic clock, and announces the time to the GPS receiver via radio broadcast. The GPS receiver can then determine it’s distance from each clock and triangulate it’s exact position (by comparing it’s own time with that announced by the satellite, and dividing by the speed of light).
So an artifact of having a GPS receiver in a smartwatch is that the smartwatch has access to atomic time. (Smartphone also have access to network and cellular time — usually official, atomic time — via the Internet and their cellular connection. The Hyetis also has WiFi and Bluetooth, so if it’s connected to an iPhone it could get cellular network or Internet official time.)
So what is this Hyetis doing with a large amount of space and weight reserved for the latest 1930s technology, an automatic Swiss mechanical watch movement? The reason can only be to continue to reinforce the belief that a fine watch needs 1930s technology.
Marketing vs. accurate time
The Swiss did indeed make breakthroughs in mechanical watch engineering, and led the world in the 1930s and 1940s with their tiny automatic watch movements. (“Automatic” in the 1930s meant the watch didn’t need to be wound; it would use your wrists movements to wind the spring. In the quartz era of the 1970s, this mean you either needed to wear the watch constantly (an issue if it is a $10K Rolex) or you needed to have a mechanical winding tray at home to ensure the watch kept accurate time. (Although your battery-powered 1970s quartz watch, at a fraction of the price, did not have these issues, and kept accurate time for 5 years, at which point you simply replaced it.)
This 1930s Swiss technology became obsolete in the 1970s with the introduction of much more accurate (and much cheaper) quartz movements. Accurate quartz movements didn’t need to come from Switzerland, so the Swiss had lost their technological advantage. Marketing to rescue: a huge (and successful) campaign was launched to convince you that the finest watches used 1930s technology (where the Swiss held a near-monopoly).
So the Heytis gives the impression that it is something of a Rube Goldberg machine. On the one hand, the GPS component ensures the smartwatch computer will have the latest time. On other hand, you have the watch hands driven, not by the smartwatch computer with it’s perfect official time, but by a inaccurate, bulky 1930s mechanism whose only purpose can be to avoid shattering the illusion that expensive Swiss mechanisms are somehow needed.
Timing that moon shot
Steampunk or a Rube Goldberg machine?
The term “steampunk” comes to mind. Perhaps this is why John Biggs of Techcrunch described the Heytis as “the smartwatch from outer space.” There is something Doctor Who-like about the Heytis. (Fans of the original Star Trek TV show will occasionally see 1960s style mechanical gauges in the background, mixed with some very accurate predictions about technology we now use every day; it was inconceivable to set designers in the 1960s to imagine digital gauges would someday be faster and more practical due to the ability to integrate with other electronics. Dr. Who has run practically forever as a science fiction series, and has a similar problem, with fans remembering the now obviously antiquated controls that appeared in some of the early episodes. The series has instead decided to consciously embrace a “steampunk” vibe and intentionally use antiquated controls in a futuristic spacecraft as an artistic statement.)
Some other watches have their watch hands computer-controlled. The Citizen Eco series, for example, has its watch hands keep perfect atomic time under microprocessor control. If you change timezones, the hands will suddenly move to the new location, startling onlookers. The watch hands can also be used for something other than telling time (subtely signally you have have an email on your phone, for example.) The Rube Goldberg-esque design of Heytis doesn’t seem to make this possible.