GLOWING CONCERN

Telling time in the dark is a big business that also transcends functionality. In addition to giving you a sense of assurance, a watch with excellent low light legibility can also be quite playful

- JOSH SIMS

If, it seems, there is one experience that unites all watch designers - indeed, many of those working in any capacity in the watch industry - it is the one that happens as a child, under the duvet. “One of the earliest memories of my dad is him saying goodnight and me quickly charging up the ‘lume’ on my watch under the bedside lamp, so I’d see it glow under the covers for a while when the light went out,” recalls Maximillian Busser, the founder of MB&F. “It was reassuring then - and I still get some pleasure out of seeing a watch glow. It’s a little presence, a little life.”

Time and again grown men will speak of their love of a watch at night. Of course, as Don Cochrane, founder of Vertex watches stresses, that many watch hands and indices have been given a lick of some luminescent substance since World War One - when a mix of radium and zinc sulphide was used - is primarily for its obvious practical benefit: so the dial of a mechanical watch is visible in the dark, or deep under water. But, he adds, luminescence also does much to define the appeal of a watch - it provides the other side of a watch’s personality, a second character that only comes out in the dark.

“It appeals almost at some neanderthal level, as though some brain chemistry is triggered by things that glow,” he says. “And it’s an appeal you can’t get from a battery-powered watch light. It’s just not the same.”