Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…These are not computers. Right. All of the logic is encoded mechanically in a gear train. It’s beautiful. Where we left off here is our escapement where we’ve got the pallet fork, it’s this little T, and it’s a tick and a tock. It flicks back and forth, and moves the gears all forward one tick. How do you get it to tick back and forth? What is the mechanism by which this pallet fork goes to tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock? This is where we introduce a big hero of the whole mechanical watch story. The balance. The balance also has two parts. There’s a balance wheel and a hairspring. These two things are stuck together around the same center point. Picture the wheel of a bike. That would be the balance wheel, like a hula hoop. Then the gears go around the same axle on a bike. You can imagine that you’ve seen the rear wheel of a bike. In this analogy, those gears are the hairspring and the outer wheel is the balance wheel. That’s what this component looks like. The hairspring looks really cool. It is another coiled-up piece of metal, although it’s much looser and more fluid than the tightly wound mainspring that we talked about earlier. Unlike everything else that is incredibly tight inside a watch, this component, the balance almost floats and it moves with really low friction. It’s weird because it’s the opposite of everything else that’s in the whole watch. The way it works is the hairspring spins really fast in one direction. For anyone who’s ever taken a spring and tried to uncoil it you note that it only goes so far and then it wants to go back to its resting position. And then you try to go the other direction and tighten it a little bit. That doesn’t work either. It wants to go back to its natural resting position. That’s what’s happening here. You’ve got the hairspring, which spins really fast in one direction, and then the energy that it has stored is overcome by the mechanical resistance of unwinding the spring. It stops and then it spins real fast in the other direction. This cycle goes back and forth, spinning back and forth, tick and tock, and flicking that pallet fork back and forth to continually release one little interval of energy and one little advance of the whole gear train. It is beautiful. Amazing. You can totally see why for the right person, this is like a Porsche 911 or it’s just catnip. You can’t get enough of this.…

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