What Time Is It?

Watch. Shoelaces. Spelling. What Time Is It?

Do you remember when a watch was a high school graduation gift?

Old Post Office Pavilion,Washington, DC

The only time I see actors wearing watches on television these days is when they are playing lawyers who want to show off their expensive Rolex watches.

As far as I can tell, anyone under 30 who wants to know the time takes out their cell phone.

Quartz versus Mechanical

The last time I received a watch as a gift, I was stubborn. I wanted it to have a traditional analog clock face, not a digital numbers read-out.

But, I gave in on the idea of having a quartz watch as being less expensive and more accurate than a mechanical one.

Seiko introduced the first quartz watch in 1969, four years after the beautiful mechanical watch I’d received from my parents as a high school graduation gift.

Within ten years, quartz watches dominated the industry and decimated that of the 100-year-old Swiss mechanical watchmakers, which didn’t recover until the 1980s, with the introduction of the Swatch, an inexpensive non-repairable watch with colorful graphic designs.

Analog versus Digital

In a 2004 article, “Revenge of the Analog Clock,” Douglas Adams was asked to explain a quote from one of his books about earthlings being so primitive they still used digital watches. He drew an analogy with the ease of reading a pie chart from a spreadsheet program compared to a column of numbers.

In a poll of 59 users, 58 percent (compared to 34 percent for digital) reported that analog watches were easier to read.

By contrast, 63 percent (compared to 10 percent for analog) said that digital watches were more precise because of the read-out for numbers of minutes.

Clock Towers’ Resurgence

I read in a recent article from The Washington Post, called “Public Clocks Stand the Test of Time,” that cities’ old-fashioned clock towers are coming back into fashion.

The Old Post Office Pavilion in Washington, DC is one of the tallest buildings in the city because of its clock tower.

Certainly, they are not coming back because anyone needs a clock tower to tell them what time it is. It is because the tradition is comforting and the buildings are beautiful.

Grandchildren and Watches

Long since my children grew up grandparents have been concerned that their grandchildren were not learning how to read an analog clock face in school.

Why would they? Once they could read numbers and understood the concept of hours and minutes, they could easily read any digital clock.

But, just like learning to tie your shoelaces was delayed a year or so with the introduction of Velcro shoe straps, learning how to read an analog clock is delayed a year or so after learning how to read a digital clock.

But, adults still read analog clocks, so children learn how. Nothing entices a child more than to think that adults have a secret code they haven’t yet mastered.

Just try spelling something out to another adult in front of your just-learned-how-to-read grandchildren to see if they haven’t also learned how to spell.

When did you get your first watch?

Were you excited?

How old were your children when they got their first watches?

Do your grandchildren have watches or cell phones?

To you and the gift of time with your grandchildren.

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Carol L. Covin, Granny-Guru

Author, “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers”

http://newgrandmas.com