Sharp As A Tack

The Longines Conquest VHP collection has a laser-focus on extreme accuracy and precision

- Yeo Suan Futt

Timekeeping, and by extension wristwatches, used to hold much greater allure and prestige among a broader spread of society than it does today. This is not a reference to the 19th century or something, but instead mere decades ago, at the precise moment quartz movements gave more people the chance to have their own personal timekeepers. Strangely, the promise of a brighter future for accuracy did not pan out as planned.

Budget air travel and an ocean of information distributed worldwide that can be called up in an instant on any screen from phone to tablet and terminal, have set the bar very high for curios. In other words, nothing excites anymore. Though it has only been a few centuries since table-sized clocks were accurate enough to be fitted with minute hands, and just about a century since the affordability of wristwatches extended beyond gentry to the common man, the general public seems to have largely forgotten what an awesome thing a wearable timekeeper is, in reliably dividing the continuum of time into discrete intervals that we can mark and measure.

AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

We bring this up because before accurate timekeeping became so commoditised (appearing on phones and ovens, as it is often bemoaned) that it descended into the mundane, watches were special and regarded with the respect accorded to specialist instruments. And the very thing they specialised in was precision timekeeping. Those were the days when chronometry competitions would generate a fair bit of excitement, because creating a supremely accurate watch was no small feat of technical ingenuity.