Digital Watches
The dividing line may not be laser sharp, but there are traditionalists who prefer an analog watch and moderns who go for digital.
Opinions on which is superior get heated, but peaceful coexistence can be gained by recognizing the benefits of both.
Digital watches show the time without the use of sweeping hands, and are usually driven by electronic circuits rather than mechanical assemblies.
That may seem like a small value, but there are many advantages attached. No sweeping hands means fewer moving parts to break.
How many times have you had an analog watch in which the hands came lose from a gear and simply flopped around the face?
Though many analog watches now have all-electronic mechanisms inside, digital watches are the ultimate use of that. The original designs from the late 1960s incorporated a quartz crystal that was attached to a series of LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes).
The small diodes glowed (usually red) when a voltage was applied. Which got illuminated was controlled by circuitry that selected the right set of dots to show the correct time.
Modern versions still use a variation of that design, but are more commonly LCD (Liquid Crystal Diode) types of the sort now found in computer monitors and HDTVs.
They’re also as or more accurate. That may seem like a small thing, since very few need to know the current time to within a nanosecond. But it does save one from the trouble that plagued early models, the necessity to adjust the time every month or year.
Accuracy has reached a zenith with atomic watches. Despite the name, they don’t use any kind of atomic counter themselves.
The atomic clock controlling their time measurement is actually located far away, at the US Naval Observatory or the National Institute of Standards in Colorado.
An atomic clock uses a carefully calibrated mechanism to measure the cycles in an atom, usually Cesium - which vibrates at an extraordinarily precise rate.
A radio signal is broadcast, typically once per day at 1:00 am, to signal the watch the current time. Electronic circuitry inside the watch then readjusts any time difference to the current atomic-clock specified time.
Most modern digital watches do much more than tell the time accurately to a microsecond, though. With the increased miniaturization of electronic circuitry over the past few decades, they’ve come to incorporate more and more functions.
Far beyond just giving the day and date, or housing a simple calculator, they can function as small radios or TVs, or even a cell phone or Internet browser.
There are many people in the fast-paced contemporary world that find it a big practical benefit to have Google’s huge database literally at their fingertips 24-hours per day.
Digital watches have a style all their own, one that is consonant with an ultra-modern contemporary society. For those who want their style to reflect that, there’s a digital watch that is just right for you.