Watches: is mechanical movement still better than quartz?

A smoothly sweeping seconds hand is often used by a budding watch fancier as an indicator of quality. If you are close enough to tell the time, you can see whether the hand ticks once per second, or glides around majestically. But who made this the horological tyre kick of choice and does it have any merit?

Aesthetically the one-second tick is not ideal because the hand generally fails to meet up exactly with the markers on the dial. Some people might not care too much about this, but for those of a perfectionist leaning it can be quite annoying to see a precision instrument failing to hit its mark every single second, forever.

Mainly the tick tells you that the watch is probably battery powered. In the early days of experimenting with quartz, they were made with sweeping seconds hands, but it was found to drain the power too quickly, so one tick per second was settled on as the standard. Since the Eighties, quartz has been by far a cheaper choice of movement, thus the ticking seconds became associated with low price. Mechanical watches, once the only game in town, became luxury items, and as most of these tick between four and eight times per second, the smooth sweep became coveted.

Of course life is not always that simple. As well as putting a watch on the moon, Bulova is known for its many innovations in quartz tech, one of several companies making high-beat quartz movements that take advantage of technological advances to make the battery powered sweeping hand a practical reality.

But if a sweeping quartz is confusing, some very posh watchmakers do exactly the opposite, making a mechanical watch engineered to tick once a second. The so-called deadbeat, or jumping seconds, requires an extra mechanism to slow the hand down. For this reason it is the preserve of watchmakers like Jaeger-LeCoultre and A Lange & Söhne that pride themselves on doing difficult stuff just because they can.

So most quartz watches tick, and most mechanicals glide, but sometimes it can be the other way round. Quartz versus mechanical isn’t the only mark of quality though – there are plenty of excellent quartz watches and bargain basement mechanicals.

The way a watch ticks is just the start.